Little Weirds(19)

In the town of Bergen, where I stayed for the night by myself, there were raincoats for sale in the window. It wasn’t raining and the way they were displayed seemed like a straightforward and warmhearted suggestion. It felt like the raincoats said, “As a matter of fact, people are warmhearted, just as they are air breathers and leg walkers and eye see-ers. But sometimes rain makes them get all wet, and so here are coats in case that happens. They are reasonably priced and well made.”

I went to where my friend told me to go to eat dinner and I let spaghetti hang out of my mouth while I was alone in the restaurant. I didn’t let it hang for a long time, I just paused for a moment and noticed that the pause made me feel embarrassed, not the noodle.

Then, it’s hard to describe how happy the breakfast at the little hotel made me feel. It wasn’t because it was a huge spread, although it was certainly not skimpy. It was the combination of the offerings. It was that there was pickled fish but also cherry jam. The bread was yellow. There was ham but also cucumbers were sliced and arranged nicely. The yogurt was thin and tart and the coffee was splendid.

The night before, the man in the room next to me snored loudly, but I wasn’t cross at all. And yes, the word to use is cross, but again, I wasn’t at all. It is so nice to be a little bit closer to other humans. No soundproofing or blocking when a hotel is just a big old mansion from three hundred years ago. It is nice to be with strangers, and everyone is trying to sleep, and we are all in nothing but a big old house. The facts are enough. And then the breakfast just pushed it all over the edge.

I found my way to the docks so that I could take the two-hour ferry to where my friend and her sweetheart were waiting for me. They were with two other women as well. They were all friends. I was really only friends with my friend and I was new and I was shy and so of course I was also very brave. For the fjord boat, a man brought for himself a bottle of pink wine, a long sandwich, and a small can of pineapples.

The can of pineapples was a cousin to the airport hot dog.

On the ferry, I noticed that there was an upside-down dent in the clouds that looked like a hole to something else, like a funnel to an upside-down kingdom, for example. A seagull was in the water, trying to push ahead. The wind spun him around so that his butt was facing where he was trying to go. His expression was still the same, even though his face was where his butt should have been and his butt was facing his destination. He showed no signs of stress.

A grumpy young man was the ticket person on this boat. He was also the person in charge of running the little snack bar. The boat moved from its dock so quickly that it seemed like it was controlled by his mind or his expression, like how somebody gets their horse to start going just by nodding at it, not that I really know about that because I dislike horses and have refused to know the truth about them and how they work.

I listened to music and I watched what passed and I saw animals on the piney islands and I didn’t know if they were small goats or large cats, but of course large cats are not the right answer.

When I arrived at the town and met my party of new friends, we went to dinner in a castle named after a woman called Karen. Karen was from the 1600s but her name was Karen. I have never had a really great feeling about castles because I don’t love the image of old kings. Old kings in the past are always dying of wet coughs and flaking faces, while being propped up on a million dirty velvet pillows. I find those images to be disgusting, but that was not what this castle was like. It was lovely and cozy and good.

Inside of the castle, there were many geraniums on the windowsills, in two colors, red and pale pink. I was making a normal face but because of those geraniums, nothing inside of me was normal because it was just all fresh air in there, just possibility, no bones or muscles or anything else. I love red geraniums.

I took a walk and there was a young Norwegian teen by a very old barn. He was doing a waltzy hip-hop dance while eating an ice cream cone.

The next day, we played cards, walked through gardens, smelled every flower, got drunk, ate a lot of halloumi cheese, and one night I ordered from the children’s menu while I sat at the table with my adult friends. I ordered from the children’s menu because it had a dish called “Sausages” and I wanted that more than the more traditional, fish-based fare on the main menu.

When my dinner arrived, it was a plate and on the plate were two long, curved, naked hot dogs. The waitress seemed angry to have to give it to me. Although I was not attempting to recreate the soothing normal hot dog situation that I saw with the businesswoman in the airport, I was aware that I was not even close to accomplishing whatever she had accomplished. I was a bit embarrassed of my weiners but I still ate them and they were fine. None of my new friends cared.

When I went farther up into the Arctic Circle with my friend and her sweetheart, we met another friend of theirs. He was tall and had dark hair and I enjoyed talking to him but I could never really look him in the eye for a number of reasons. He made an apple pie, roasted a chicken, drove the car, painted me a picture of a small blue flower, and said my name when calling me over to look at a horse that he knew I was not happy about. He told me lines from a poem that he heard in a dream.

We all went out in a boat and we were rowing from the house to a little island with a lighthouse on it. When we were halfway there, we realized that it was much farther than it had seemed when we were standing on our own shore, but we made it there and when we got there the island was covered in gorgeous shells and the lighthouse was actually strangely small, like a nub. We sat there and my friend realized that she’d forgotten the wine and when she realized she forgot the wine, she stuck her tongue out in embarrassment. I just loved her so much and I always will and I remembered that I’d seen her stick her tongue out like this previously, when we had crashed our sleds the winter before, also, strangely, in Norway.