One-Way Ticket for One

by Sage Gregory (United States of America)

Making a local connection Norway

Nothing, not one thing in the entire unexplored galactic reaches, manages to wear me down like customs. I have yet to pinpoint the moment of first blood, perhaps in the interrogations that leave every answer flat and hanging, or the soul piercing leer of pupil to dilated pupil. It may simply be that I don't intake air again until the ordeal is complete, beginning from the moment I enter that humming throng of travelers at the back of the line. I landed in Bergen half dead. Not half asleep, though I had slept very little in Berlin the night before, thin hostel windows failing absolutely to keep out the shouts of drunken and disappointed World Cups fans. Not half alive either. The connotation in that phrase is just too damn positive. No, I was half dead and it was entirely due to the three customs checkpoints I had floated through to make it here. My body had been through these motions on so many occasions I did not need to tap into my cognitive abilities, the colored buttons the same as any, despite the illegible Norwegian scrawled onto the bus kiosk's screen. I was on autopilot, a husk of human bone and sinew snatching the bus ticket to Bergen city center before collapsing into my window seat. The odd thirty minute commute gave me a moment to revive myself. I stared lovingly out the window at the beautiful Norwegian pines and congratulated myself on getting all my atoms into this country in the right order, an almost inexplicable goal of mine since I was a fourteen year old girl, eyes glued to the television screen, not entirely believing in the trolls that moved in and out of the camera's focal point but falling deeper and deeper into an infatuation with the country-side and stuttered sounding language I'd turned up with the volume button. I had, since my adolescent introduction to Norway via trolls, become a low-key expert on the place. It was summer and I was a student, a history student with a specialized major in Vikings and Anglo-Saxon England (I have graduated since that time and tell very few people this fact about myself, as the instant the words "Anglo-Saxon" leave my lips I've lost their attention). This was not my first time traveling, in fact quite the opposite. I had spent every summer of my college career abroad, funding myself with the money I earned in the school year as one of our small college town's only baristas when not studying in the UK. But this was my first time traveling completely alone, I had been alone for a month and a half at this point, my travels beginning in Iceland, Ireland, and Germany before I had made it to my true destination. It had all led up to this really. I marinated in that thought as Bergen made itself known through the thinning pines. This memory of mine is not a thrilling tale. I could have thrown seven hundred words down about the time I was almost kidnapped in Morocco, but that is not a personal tale, I could compare notes on that one to the countless females who experienced similar terrors there. I strongly considered the conversation I had with a drunk Scotsman on a train from Aberdeen, his plan to commit suicide in our shared destination of Edinburgh made known to me in a series of personal stories, slurred and sobbed through until I realized I may have been the first person he had spoken to about this, my unfamiliarity his crutch. But this tale, this tame and boring tale of my first hours in Norway, speak so strongly of my determination to see absolutely everything, no matter how far from my place of origin. And that is what makes a wanderer a wanderer, and more importantly, what makes me me.