In the next five years of my life, between ages 20 and 25, I dropped out of college; got my first job; began to write poetry; travelled to Russia with my husband by way of Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and a 20-hour train ride from Helsinki to Moscow; left my marriage after three months there; travelled alone out again by train to Helsinki; and flew back to New York via Iceland. Returning to California, I worked at UC Berkeley for a minute; spent three months near Monterey in a utopian community school; hitchhiked with a boyfriend from Oregon to New York City; worked at the United Nations; met my daughter's father; traveled with him by freighter to Africa and into Spain, where we lived on the Balearic Islands for six months; and returned to New York by way of Paris, Brussels, and Iceland, once again traveling alone. Within another six months I would be back in California and never leave the west coast again. In those five years, the direction of my life was fractured like a tree limb in a high wind. My future would become a digging out from the wreckage that followed. |