Something Else

Kate Bladek

September 17, 2025, 16:24 PDT, Seattle, Washington

My heart jackrabbits in my chest. Adrenaline floods my stomach, spills down the numb cavities of my legs, spikes through the veins of my arms, leaving them weak and floating. The late-summer sun is orange and incessant, pouring through the windshield so thickly that I have to flip the visor down to see anything. The glare on the road is near-blinding, but I still watch the freeway being eaten up as we leave more and more of the familiar route behind. I fail to breathe deeply and think it’s a good thing my Dad is driving.

At the airport, he waits with me for the baggage check to open and we chatter away in line, definitely annoying the people around us, but I can’t seem to quiet down. I go to the restroom and he holds my carry-on. He walks me all the way to security, and I hug him tight and tell him he needs to leave immediately, before I start crying. I mostly pull myself together while I stand in line, blinking rapidly and looking upwards to corral the moisture in my eyes, and that’s when I catch sight of him on the level above me, watching over my progress, and the thinly-stitched rags of my composure shred. I wave at him even as my face crumples and heats with tears. He waves back, and I can almost hear him say, “Buck up, kiddo.” 

I heave my suitcase onto the rolling belt and pass out of his view.

September 19, 2025, 8:52 BST, Aberystwyth, Wales

I wake on a stiff, twin-sized mattress, enveloped in bedding straight out of the package and its accompanying chemical smell. My eyes are grouted shut with sleep and I fumble for a bedside lamp before remembering that I don’t have one. After extricating myself from a tangle of sheets, I flick on the harsh overheads and take in the room that, as of about twelve hours ago, is now mine. Bed, desk, nightstand, wardrobe, window. Trash: empty ramen cup (German instructions), peach Peelerz bag, cracked plastic water bottle from a Dublin airport vending machine. Borrowed chopsticks, borrowed towel, bedraggled suitcases on the floor. The map on the wall is in Welsh.

I dig to the bottom of my backpack, which has collected a layer of some foreign dust over the last day and a half, and surface with a squished protein bar, which I stuff in my pocket. My phone is effectively a brick—devoid of wifi, cell service, language translation, GPS—offering nothing but two downloaded playlists from a premium music subscription under the name of a summer coworker. 

I snap a photo of myself (puffed-out braid, matted eyelashes, hoodie from the university I won’t be attending this year) for my digital cache, then put myself together as well as can be expected after twenty-four hours of travel, eight hours of jet lag, and five hours of sleep. After shouldering out the front door and failing to orient myself, I walk up to the first vaguely official-looking person I see. “Excuse me—Hi. I got in late last night. Exchange student, you know? Can you tell me where the information desk is?

September 24, 2025, 7:00 BST, Aberystwyth, Wales

I open my phone, and the first thing I see is an email entitled, Whales?

Five hundred words from my best friend, who tells me that she hopes my first week out of the country has been good and that she’s made alphabet soup back home. I write back about the National Library, the cafés and pubs, the inexplicably large proportion of Germans among my recently-met friends. I do not tell her how lonely I feel. 

I’ve spent the last seven days unpacking, warily testing out the ravenous university laundry machines, navigating Lidl and Tesco to look over sleeves of digestives and boxes of Weetabix and to goggle at the affordable price of blueberries. I go to university welcome breakfasts and speeches and quiz nights. I meet new people. I wonder if they like me and if I like them. I miss my family. I am rained on, a lot. I eat microwaved meals, wondering when I’ll finally get a minute to cook. I daydream of alphabet soup.

October 7, 2025, 18:38 BST, Aberystwyth, Wales

I whoop and pump my arms in the air as my launched plastic centipede lands in Sonja’s cider. 

“Nooo.” She fishes it out and takes aim at mine.

Various insects and skeletons are flicked around the table, flashes of green and black and purple. Ella has poised a stack of them on the rim of Heloise’s drink. Celina pulls out her phone; Nina and Juno smile for a picture. Nobody is paying attention to the quiz night anymore, occupied by the free drinks given out at the Students’ Union bar. When the event is over, we linger outside the doors, swinging on each others’ arms, laughing and hollering and tossing around a single stolen skeleton.

A few hours ago, I was on the phone with my Dad, fixing my hair and explaining to him how sweet the cider here is, running down the names of my friends. 

“Ella and Nina are the French ones?” he repeats.

“No, Dad.” I giggle. “Heloise and Nina are the French ones.” 

November 29, 2025, 17:03 GMT, London, England

The Cheshire cat grins at me from his window display perch. Backlit in shades of blue and purple, he sits atop the Wonderland tree with its strange directions scrawled on scrap wood signs: “Down,” “This way,” “Yonder,” “Back.”

Black Friday crowds choke the darkened street. I check my phone again, waiting for some sign of when Juno will emerge from the jungle-like vertical mall that I evacuated after only ten minutes inside. We need to get back to our hostel so I can dress for a seven-thirty showing of The Phantom of the Opera, and—contrary to the German stereotype—she’s making us late. 

I spot her blond head over a sea of hatted ones. She apologizes and says something about waiting in line. It’s okay, it’s fine, but we have to go quickly. We look around us, and I realize that’s like saying we have to hustle through Jell-O. 

But Juno grabs my hand, says, “don’t lose me,” and darts through the crowd. I call directions to her from my GPS app as we duck and weave, keeping our grips tight as we squeeze through narrow gaps and occasionally collide with someone. Down, this way, yonder, back. The estimated minutes to arrival tick down quicker than expected, and it seems that Juno’s hardwiring from fourteen years spent navigating Manhattan has kicked into high gear, giving us back time and then some. We arrive at the hostel two minutes early.

Five hours later, I emerge from His Majesty’s Theatre wearing a long black dress and four-inch heels, which I kick off when I reach the street in favor of my peeling Adidas. The crowds are still thick as tar. I watch as a sneakered foot lifts ahead of me, revealing a five pound note stuck to the black pavement. I pick it up and tuck it in my dress, the Overture still echoing through my head.

December 4, 2025, 7:17 GMT, Aberystwyth, Wales

“Oh, shit. Shit and double shit.” 

I sit on the carpet, cradling the voltage converter in my lap and plugging and unplugging one end of its cord from the wall, the other from my laptop. The pinpoint green light encased in the hunk of plastic stays dark. 

I examine the wall socket by lamplight, the early December morning still black through my open curtains. I fiddle and poke and fail to resuscitate my only method for charging the lifelines of my phone and laptop. My eVisa, university email, coursework, message apps, emergency contacts, all on a timer doomed to inaccessibility in a few hours. 

A slow-growing pain behind my sternum suddenly bursts with new vigor, and I look up to keep my tear ducts in check. In the last week, I’ve been locked out of my checking account, had my amazon log-in interned behind a wall of corporate jargon (we have detected suspicious activity), and now this. I drop the converter and then my head. Now this. 

I call the university maintenance line and a man in work clothes comes to examine the situation before telling me there’s nothing he can do—I’ll have to wait for a new converter to come.

Classes and final due dates loom as the winter holiday approaches, the one that I won’t be going home for. I message my parents—who are asleep on the west coast of the U.S. for another eight hours—to tell them what’s about to happen. Don’t worry if I don’t respond. Don’t worry—I’m only halfway around the world with no way to charge anything.

An hour later, there’s a knock on my door. I answer and find the maintenance man getting steadily rained on and carrying a power converter. He holds it out to me. “It’s your lucky day,” he says. “Some other American left this at the Students’ Union.”

December 11, 2025, 18:32 GMT, Aberystwyth, Wales

Walking home from class is a trudge after it rains. Up wind-tunnel stairs, over the exposing pedestrian bridge, across a yard of slick, muddy grass. I let myself into the warm light of the flat, looking down at the footprints on the carpet as my brain hums through a list of assignments and deadlines. I stop short in front of my bedroom door, where a box roughly the size of a spaceship blocks my entry. I check the return address. It’s my Mom’s. I’m expecting a box of Christmas chocolates from home, but this looks like the whole candy store. I feel like somebody has poured champagne bubbles into my head, my chest, and I squeal a little as I unlock the door and scoot the massive package inside.

The video call with my Mom lasts an hour and a half. She’s sent three boxes of chocolate, glass baubles to decorate my room, books, teas, and a handwritten card. Everything is wrapped in the colorful papers from home. I start crying halfway through, all of my homesickness rising in a sudden tidal wave and choking me with a strange and potent mixture of longing and giddiness. I don’t want to hang up, even after everything has been opened. I tell my Mom I love her, I miss her, that my friends will appreciate the chance to try American chocolate. That I love her again, and then we end the call.

December 24, 2025, 9:30 CET, Le Mesnil-en-Thelle, France

The house is still morning-cold, but my borrowed sweater is warm. Heloise’s family is upstairs, and she and I help ourselves to day-old croissants and yogurt from the kitchen before switching on Maman, j'ai raté l'avion!

At lunch, Mrs. Ransay serves foie gras and herbed escargot like a restaurant hostess out of a movie and Mr. Ransay tells me about a new French Christmas commercial before turning the TV to old Claude François music videos and peppering us with fun facts. 

Qui pourrait me dire qui je suis? Et j'ai bien peur…

“I like this one,” I say. “He’s really good.”

“Yes,” Mr. Ransay replies. “And he probably would have made more, but he tried to change a lightbulb while standing in the bath.”

January 1, 2026, 9:53 CET, Augsburg, Germany

Grubby dishes and scraped-out jars of peanut butter are piled on the countertop. Spezi bottles litter the stained tablecloth, labels flowing with the colors of a cartoon sunset. The liquor collection huddles in front of a checked green backsplash, as if trying to recover from the abuse inflicted on it by a group of twenty-somethings the night before. The sun is filtering sluggish and golden through the kitchen window, lying lazily against the borrowed blanket around my legs and sliding over the threadbare fabric of the couch I spent the night on. Sonja’s flat is asleep and filled to the brim with people. I pull myself up in search of a mug and some tea.

Last night, I stood on a bridge overlooking a criss-cross of train tracks and dark gravel. Smoke lay thick as insulation between me and the stars. Empty liquor bottles stood upright in the street, and I watched through the crush of bodies as people propped fireworks in their necks and lit the fuses. I pulled out my phone to take a short video for my parents, but cut it off when I heard a chorus of my name, shouted by Sonja’s friends, all of whom I’d met only a few hours prior. They handed me a sparkler stick, and we crowded around the single pocket lighter like moths, then stood in a tight circle to watch our collection of fizzy, golden lights. 

January 5, 2026, 21:23 GMT, Aberystwyth, Wales

I practically bounce across the grass on the way back to my flat. Suitcase in hand, hair limp and unwashed and tucked into a failing scrunchie. I feel absolutely disgusting.

It’s been three weeks since I switched off the appliances in my flat and left for London Gatwick, since I touched down in Zurich and began my circuitous interrailing path through Switzerland and Germany and France. It’s been three weeks since I’ve been at home. I pull up short. Home? Not by dictionary definition, certainly, but I realize that slowly, surely, Aberystwyth has wormed its way into familiarity. I realize that come June, there will be no going home, not fully, because part of me is now rooted here. I’ve been removed from the puzzle of my country and become a piece molded to fit strangely into two places instead of cleanly into one. 

The night air is crisp and I drink it in. The promise of a warm shower is close at hand. There is snow on the ground, nearly an inch, and it’s beautiful, quiet, illuminated by the glow of streetlamps. Somebody has written on a frost-powdered sign: Snow? In this economy?

I smile to myself and unlock my front door.

January 16, 2026, 11:58 GMT, Aberystwyth, Wales

The train station steps are a little grimy, but they’ve been warmed by the weak winter sun, so I sit, propping my suitcase in front of me. Ella sits too, one step up, and tells me about chewing coca leaves in Peru as we wait for my train. This is the last time I’ll see her in Aberystwyth—the last time before a train arrives to take me to Birmingham International and she leaves for Heidelberg. I’m going to see my family for the first time in four months, to meet them at the airport in just a few hours for a week-long visit. Ella will be gone before I get back. Juno, Celina, and Sonja have left already. I’m buzzed with excitement, mellow with grief—split in two, like brain hemispheres across the gulf of a severed corpus callosum, experiencing opposites simultaneously and without overlap.

I hand over a lemon muffin and a white-enveloped card, telling Ella not to read it while I’m here because I’ve never been great with that. She walks me to the single, shaded platform and we watch the red numbers on the station’s digital clock count down to two minutes before departure. She stays to wave goodbye through the train car’s dirt-caked glass. I watch her as I pull away, as she turns and steps back into the sunlight with her lemon muffin.

January 21, 2026, 23:35 GMT, Swansea, Wales

My stomach gurgles and I set my book facedown, abusing the spine. “I need a late night snack. Wanna come?”

My little sister abandons her homework pages across the snowy expanse of our shared duvet and we make our way upstairs, giggling and shushing each other through the unlit hallways. The rented flat is stacked like a wedding cake, the kitchen its crowning piece on the third floor. We’re up too late, my fault—I kept the light on and alternated between reading the book I bought at London Paddington and answering her questions about decimals and percentages. 

Now, I raid the fridge for quesadilla ingredients. My sister insists she doesn’t want one and then steals half of mine in small, unassuming bites. I sneak her an extra oat biscuit from the package and she tells me about what home is like without me, how annoying our parents can be, how frustrating it is to feel alone.

I realize a tension in me has gone: the worry that we’d lose this, the ability to confide and gossip and scheme and hate and love each other. We’re already so different, half sisters separated by nearly a decade and more recently the Atlantic, but it seems our footing remains solid. 

After midnight, I squeeze her in a hug and squish my cheek against hers, then tell her to keep her slimy feet to herself before switching off the light.

February 7, 2026, 8:05 GMT, Aberystwyth, Wales

I settle in at my desk with a bowl of scrambled eggs and a mug of black tea. My room is warmed by orange fairy lights and the postcards on my wall. Through my little window, rain drizzles over a cool gray morning. The soggy paths are deserted, everyone sleeping in. The world is quiet and so am I. Most days are something. Some days are something else.