September 2023

“Look, a T-rex!” Brendan shouted.

I looked out at the clouds, eye level from our two-thousand-foot perch in the steep gray mountains of Lofoten Islands, and watched vapor take the form of a toothy snout above short-armed claws.

A few seconds later, it didn’t look like anything.

I sat cross legged in the door of my tent and Brendan leaned back in a soft patch of heather a few feet away. Brendan and I had been friends for years, he had accompanied me on two of my longest trips through the mountains, but this hundred mile walk through northern Norway was different. I hadn’t planned to be there.

We fell quiet, familiar with each other’s silence, and I played Ludovico Einaudi’s Nuvole Bianche over the speakers of my iPhone.

As the song began, my mind drifted back to the previous year, mid-April, on another day I’d been caught looking at clouds.

“What are you doing?” Jay asked.

I stood in his backyard in Seattle, stared up at the sky, raised my camera, and pressed the shutter.

“See that cloud?” I asked.

Jay looked. 

Floating in the otherwise endless blue was an oval which had begun to fracture as if invisible hands pulled at the edges.

“Oh, yeah. Nice,” he replied with a bit of a shrug.

I didn’t expect him to get it.

Later that day, she called from California.

“So, I have something to ask you,” she announced.

I paced my bedroom. It felt like someone had shoved a fist under my ribs.

“What is it?” 

“What are you doing next weekend?” she asked. 

I looked at my calendar, nothing I couldn’t change.

“Well, a friend of mine has an extra ticket to Coachella but the price is about the same as a flight to Seattle, and I was thinking I might just come see you,” she spoke hesitantly, as if the words surprised her.

“Are you sure?” I asked, trying to sound rational. “You know there won’t be many more chances to go to Coachella after this spring.”

In a few months, she would be moving to New York for medical school.

“I know, but I really want to come to Seattle and I think we need to spend more time together before we can decide to do this for real,” she said.

We met skiing in January when she came to Seattle to celebrate her birthday, and I fell in love with her on a trip to Los Angeles in late March to celebrate mine.

We lived in different states, but it was more than miles between us.

She was the only child of Korean immigrants, mid-twenties, and her entire life aimed at becoming a doctor. I was the son of evangelical homesteaders, now pursuing an English degree after the age of thirty. Her dad was a lawyer, mine was a mechanic.

Before that call, I didn’t know if we would see each other again and I wondered if we should even try—if it was better to stop before the feelings could sprout roots.

Roots always take some of the earth with them when they go.

After a long pause, she made her decision.

“I think,” she began. “I think, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to come to Seattle.”

In Norway, I looked up to catch Brendan’s eye as he glanced back at me but neither of us said a word while the song played.

Nuvole Bianche: white clouds. Seated at his first grand piano, Einaudi had watched the window while they sailed by like majestic ships. He absorbed their shapes until a melody filled his fingertips, sinking, first slow, then all at once.

How can you hold onto something that was never yours?

I wanted to tell Brendan that part of me died when I bought my ticket to Norway because it meant I wasn’t moving to Manhattan. After all the opportunities I’d never had, I turned down Columbia—unable to pay my way across the sea which divided her world from mine.

I wanted to tell him that it felt like I’d been chasing ships my whole life, only for them to evaporate as I climbed aboard. I wanted to tell him why I hung a photo of a cloud in a place I could stare whenever I played piano.

I pointed.

“Look, a UFO.”

And we watched as the ellipse disappeared.