It’s another week where posting has been disrupted due to travel. I’m back in the UK, here for a meeting and then hopping home after a fairly short stay. I don’t usually travel this often, but March had three trips scheduled within, and the biggest is yet to come.

On to the title of the post. One of the strangest, most surreal experiences I’ve had in my life to date has been going to a city in a foreign country, returning home, then returning back to that city a few days later. The sense of (somewhat unearned) familiarity in a very strange place hasn’t yet worn off, so returning you feel as if you never left, or that your time home was somehow dreamed or even hallucinatory. I think doing this much travel in a short stretch has really impressed on me why travel can feel so liminal. When you’re in a different country you get peeks into daily life, be it through people watching and the spaces you occupy or just witnessing things like advertising and the functionality of public transit. While many things are the same, the details often feel quite different.

One incident that sticks out in my mind is not from this trip, but rather the trip I took to Sweden with family back in 2024. While in Stockholm I overheard a Scottish woman having a conversation about the process of getting her work visa in Sweden, and what it would take to extend it. It reminded me not only that the culture around travel in Europe is quite different from the United States, but also that I am now past the age where picking up and moving to a different country for a couple of years to see what it’s like would be in any way practical. I sometimes feel a pang of missed opportunity when comparing such experiences to my relatively staid 20s, but at the same time, I know myself and spending a stretch of time in a country where you don’t know anyone or the primary spoken language would have been miserable for me. So it goes; we’re not all made for the same things at the end of the day.

So these are my thoughts as I write from a London hotel, staring out the window at a church that has to be at a bare minimum 250 years old with a brand new office tower going up behind it. London is fascinating given the amount of history here, and I can see why so many books have been written about the city or a fantasy version of it. London also strikes me as a core inspiration for Electric Bastionland, which makes sense as Chris McDowall is British. The sense of a city having layers is more palpable here; it’s not that a city like Boston doesn’t have some of the same thing, but London’s age and scale makes the sensation clearer, especially given a few very specific demarcations like World War II.

Soon I will go home and settle back into routine (and a single time zone), but before long I’ll be heading to a country much more foreign than the United Kingdom. I’m going to try and keep writing here weekly (as well as over at Cannibal Halfling), but I may not continue with having a tarot pull at the beginning of every month. Not only were those posts more work, but it seems that even among the sparse readership I’ve cultivated so far, nobody read them. No matter. I have a lot of stories and settings to talk about going into spring, and I will be writing and sharing more fiction. Thank you all for dropping in while I make it through a tumultuous first quarter; luckily there is both stability and sunshine on the horizon.