Olivia Motley

It is the year two thousand and sixteen. I am twenty-four years old. I am sleeping on the tile floor of a laundry room of a complete stranger in Porto. There are sixteen other strangers here- in the apartment of this person I’ve never met. “Am I too old for this?” I ask myself. “What does that even mean?” my better half replies. I remember aching hipbones. I remember the sunrise. The stranger didn’t even stay at his own house that night, because 18 strangers are overwhelming

I’m in Amsterdam for 16 hours. An old man paid 500 euros for me to accompany him for one night here. We will call him Bill. Bill is a friend of my mother’s. Bill is a pilot for a major international company. Bill assured me he expected nothing sexual in exchange for this ticket. Bill contacted me after my mom withdrew her offer to come visit me in Spain in the wake of our political differences skyrocketing in intensity after Donald Trump became President of the United States.

I found myself tangled amidst the Christmas decorations of a Chalet in a Swiss village called Grimentz. My hair has a mind of its own, and always gets tangled in ways such as this. I was with a lad I met on public transportation in New Orleans two and a half years before, when he was stumbling around and lost at 4:30 in the morning. Meet Sebastian. The night I met Sebastian in 2014, he was near the beginning of his all-American road trip. He was completely obsessed with Alaba

BACKGROUND I lived in New Orleans for three years before moving to Europe, and I'm still in love with its contagious enthusiasm for life... it's a place where people leap at any excuse to celebrate or dance… For its glitter and its dirt, for the life the city breathes into anyone that steps foot into its bumpy, sinking streets. My first real pang of homesickness happened during carnival time, as Mardi Gras is the most important time in the life of a New Orleanian. Mardi gras