I'm on a train, traveling north in Italy with Gr and El. There they are, very happy, El with her prize-winning smile. I fall asleep, and so do they. I wake up, feels like much much later, anxious that we've missed our stop When we reach the next station, it's worse than I had imagined: Stuttgart, Germany. Our destination in northern Italy wasn't important, but this is way out of range.
NIght is falling quickly as we walk down the street. We come to a restaurant on a tight, rounded corner, and become the sole customers. We get a candle at the table, and an atmosphere of no responsibility to the clock; no clocks. This is a luxury I don't want now: I want to be moving toward figuring out how to leaving this city and getting back on track as soon as possible.
Back on the street, sometime in the night, there are a few grandfathers, children, and middle-aged men who seem to belong to an old culture that has little in common with my experience of the modern world. There are also some tourists: guys my age in baggy clothes and caps and the unattached-traveler mentality.
I seem to be separating from Gr and El. Getting out of this city appears hopeless. The train station is reached through neglected passages from the street, empty linoleum hallways with Gothic chandeliers, stairs and corners. No trains or people.
Next thing I know, I find myself alone in a rowboat, in the morning, straggling into a harbor. After a lost, unconscious and dark interval, it seems like a stroke of amazing fortune to be being lapped into safety, and even more so as I come to recognize this place, as I move in from the wider, hazy, industry-lined channel to the local, urban canal, as Venice!
I step out on the pavement from a rectangular cove. The city is quiet, grimy, and unique, and just as I remember it. Through an arch, I go into what seems to be the lobby of a college in a slow period: a big room with a few couches, some notices tacked on a bulletin board, some students hanging around.
There's a pay phone on the wall in the entryway, and I know the important call I have to make, but I'm nervous to do it with these people around. I'm nervous about speaking Italian. It takes a few calls to the operator to get the number. "Da Venezia" I say, and "Si, a Lisboa."
A woman answers in the office of my university's study-abroad program. (In reality, this was not in Lisbon.) She is warm and affirmative. I expected more of a phone interview, but she says I can enroll almost right off the bat.
In my desperation, this outcome seemed like my best hope, the necessary thing for me to do in the circumstance. Now on the phone I realize the commitment.
