Horseback riding in a field of lava:
hi from Iceland, clear, cold, and clean. Iceland is sterile. Iceland has nineteen hours of daylight. Iceland is frozen eternity. Iceland has a peculiar feeling of isolated permanence, a certain pristine hostility that I can't quite put my finger on. I am in Reykjavik, where choppy seas churn chunks of ice and cutting winds make you wish you had brought fourteen more pairs of long underwear. There aren't any trees here, just hostile rock formations patched with moss. It is very quiet. Iceland is functional, despite the fact that they import practically everything and have formed their language by tossing scrabble letters into the air and naming things at random. I bought a forty dollar cd, I paid a sixteen dollar toll, I drank a five dollar coke. I went swimming in a thermal pool yesterday morning, at an hour that only old matrons and birds awake to. These bird-boned matrons were cavorting around the freezing wind in their florid, horrid swimsuits, merrily chatting and drying their hair while I crouched in the water, watching through the steam, feeling so terribly tumultuous. I am a warm, animated, temporal, emotive, aging human with a steady heartbeat, and I'm so dreadfully alone in a place of arid, brooding beauty, a place that was the same before I was born and will be the same after I die. Iceland is beautiful, but it's doing just fine without you, and it knows it. I am in Iceland, lonely on an island, icy and outlandish. hi from Iceland.
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