The first day we got to Moldova, the DJ at the restaurant that night played “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life.” We were trying to get him to play Sprinter by Dave and Central Cee, but he didn’t have it and said he would need to download it from YouTube to play it. Later we lied and said it was someone’s birthday to get free cake. They played that 50 Cent song about it being your birthday. That was after we saw someone else get cake. My Moldovan friend who is the daughter of my dad’s best friend from medical school told me that Moldovans are obsessed with 50 Cent, and also Denzel Washington. Three black guys walked in and she said she’d never seen a black guy before in real life, and she thought the third one was cute. 

The next day at a restaurant, over the radio I heard “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life” again. It was the title of a book I got from the library that I was trying to read that’s now overdue, and my boyfriend also told me that it was the name of a song. I didn’t know that before. Anyway, apparently it was really popular in Moldova, at least, for some reason, during those first two days. It threw me out of my brain, like a sign, a bridge between where I was before and where I was then, my semipermanent life at home and my temporary new one here, the one I would have for a week and a half, or then, I suspected, for two weeks. 

Unfortunately it was really hot so my brother and I cut the trip short by a week. Now I’m back, and for a few hours, maybe half a day or so, after I returned I still had that vacation afterglow that makes you feel and see things with a freshness that’s glazed over before. 

They say that about vacations, how they make you live more “in the moment” but it’s also exhausting. It barely gives you room to think and process things. Maybe you don’t need to think. Just experience things and let your subconscious make the decisions for you. It seems easier that way, less rumination. More test-and-see-what-happens.

It’s funny and weird to think back on how I was feeling before. Months before, days before. Years before. Years dressed in nostalgia, years I loved and felt so free and unburdened and as if I escaped, temporarily, from the trajectory of my life and I could exist there forever. A timeline that I hope I can slip back into once things heal a little more and get a little better. More being outside.