strangers

I sit across the aisle from another writer on my 747 flight, an older woman writing in large letters. Her scrawl resembles my grandmother’s: messy but elegant, beginning large and then fading into smaller letters. She holds pages and pages of lined paper, off-white and yellow. I am fascinated by her style. I haven’t the slightest idea what she is recording, but the rough elegance of her writing is magnificent—so different from my own.

I spent my first night in Dublin wondering if I would make it through alive. A few friends I made on a study abroad program convinced me to stay the weekend in a hostel that they had researched on the Internet.