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Sweet, milky air, growing into the nooks and crannies of my lungs, swelling them, smooth gulps of big happiness. Smiling flower faces, petals, butterflies swooping, birds with grins, singing, cheery blues and greens and deeper green, the happy shades of nature, a carefully styled musical, glad-hearted surreality.

And the voices. My own voice, back at me. No puzzled, blank stares. No lame guesses at origin, Swedish? Russian? What the hell?
Slow-talkers, kind, ridiculously helpful. I love it. And for the first time, it's mine. The place I'd cringed away from, the uneducated, suave-less lilt and naive stumblings. I belong here.
Embarrassed, I'd tried to shrug it off. Trying to trade it for exotica, anything from a movie, passionate, dark excitement. New York skin rashes, heroin dealers on subway landings, sex with strangers. Veins messy scars of numbness and weird twinges. A skinny blonde girl with an odd accent, a nothing, just a smudge in an impatient, irritated culture, monosyllabic grunts, slammed phones. Angry money-hungry, ripping you off fuckers, grinding you under their heel, just to be an inch higher for a second, blocking the tiny-penis/ non-orgasming wife/ chubby child complex.

It feels so good, way down here, at the end of the world. In with my own. What a realisation. These are real people. Being nice, because they're nice. Not wanting anything from you. Eye contact. Screwed up, for sure, but not pretending to be any other way, laughing at themselves, instead of you. I'd underestimated them. Us.