Portugal, 2006. BOOM Festival. I’m — never mind how old, what matters is that I’m old enough to know who I am and not old enough to grasp that “who I am” is an open question with an unpredictable answer, and that treating it as a settled fact is still premature.
We flew with Katya, a school crush, on Ryanair to Faro: tickets there cost the price of lunch in the Bonch cafeteria. Young, students, no money, but that wasn’t yet a problem so much as a constraint of the puzzle. Faro is a small white airport in the south of Portugal, in the Algarve: palm trees, salt wind, the smell of kerosene and lavender. You step onto the tarmac and the heat hits like an open oven.