Vanessa finally sent out that email to Daniel's university email address. There was no reply, but that was for the better. She said that she was traveling to Germany for work, which was a lie, and she would like to get some recommendations for where to go in the evening. Why would someone like her who job-hopped between various insignificant creative gigs go to an elite university town for a meeting would be a story she needed to come up with soon, but the pretext sounded plausible, if he doesn't think too much about it. The lack of reply meant that there was no confirmation that the email address was given away to someone else, nor would there be any cold, unpleasant response that Vanessa half-expected. Either he no longer held that email address, or he was too busy to reply. He might have missed it altogether, for who checks their university email anymore even if they kept ownership of it? She preferred this version of reality better than all other less attractive alternatives.
This way, at least she could board the plane to Germany with a clear conscience.
The airport reminded her of that trip when she attended the wedding of Marcel and Maria.
With the shadow of 911 still looming over everyone's heads, anyone coming and going abroad was regarded with suspicion. She recalled flying out alone, and the immigration officer at the counter asked her a lot of questions: the purpose of her trip, who she was going to visit, who was he, what was their relationship, how did they meet, how long were they together, did they have the intention of coming back together...
They were no longer together at that time, not even in spirits. It was heartbreaking, not to mention illegal, to lie to the officer when she said that she was visiting her boyfriend, while in effect their relationship had come to a sputtering end without fanfare. There was no fight that she recalled. There was no screaming, crying, or begging. It just died in cold shoulders, hard stares, and eventually the lack of any text messages that used to go back and forth between the continents.
The immigration officer asked her the same questions again this time. They never changed. She answered those questions — he was an exchange student, they met in class, they fell in love, she was going there to visit him and decide if she wanted to potentially settle down there — she felt a stab in her heart with every fake answer she gave. Tears swell up in her eyes now when she thought about it. She wondered how she managed to avoid detection by the immigration officer for blatantly lying about everything related to Daniel.
She supposed they don't really care if one was leaving the country. It wasn't like Germany was high on the list as a terrorist safe haven.
The book she ordered online hadn't arrived yet when the day of her flight arrived. Vanessa brought two other books with her on the trip.
The flight was uneventful. When she got off the plane, a strange man came up to Vanessa and asked if she was a student.
A student? She was a thirty-six-year-old woman, Vanessa thought to herself.
"It's because you are reading Cicero," the man pointed at the book she was reading. "No one reads Cicero for fun."
Vanessa only gave him a weak smile. The man explained that he was a high school teacher, from Ohio. Vanessa had no interest in listening to his life's story. Besides, she only wanted to focus on one man and one man only. For whatever reason though, Vanessa had been cajoled into exchanging phone numbers with the stranger whose name she did not even bother to remember.
He looked like a Mike, she thought and filed this event away as she stalked out of the Dortmund Airport.
"Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century," Cicero once said. "Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do."
