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(from the reading at Rao's in Amherst on 1-27)

greenland

I want to move to Greenland, which is the largest island that isn’t a continent

We can live in the lipstick-red house I saw by the sea in the dream

A psychic in Pittsfield once told me I would travel to Scottland and instinctively know my way around because I lived there in a past life, but I think she must have meant Greenland

She wore many rings which led me to believe she knew what she was doing, and ironically she also told me that my boyfriend, who paid for the reading and was sitting to our left across the cafe, was not my soulmate, and I looked at him looking at me, sipping his coffee and I thought “this lady is an asshole”

The only way to get to Greenland by air is from Iceland or Denmark, or we can charter a ferry from Newfoundland

We can forget all our statistically suburban pain to the fjords, ride the earth to our respective deaths, eat seals for breakfast and be cold but happy in the evening

I had forgotten Greenland existed until fairly recently, when Wikipedia reminded me that it did
and I wondered if Greenland gets jealous for being so big and so unrecognized as a continent

And I wondered if I could feel at home in such a barren place, and then I decided that home can be any pre-felt land

The only way to feel at home anywhere is to leave a place after having spent some time there, learning subconsciously  the way the sunlight lays or doesn’t lay on its most important streets, its least important houses

and then when you return your spatial memory is activated  and you say “ah, good old Greenland” and you really mean it this time, you are home, you are in Greenland