European Me by Aimee Friedland With the reelection of Bush I find myself in dire need to escape Les USA. As I am selfish, I almost hope that Bush will enter his second term with some dreadful blow to society as we know it- giving my parents a substantial worry for my immediate future. As timpanis crash in the background, Mother and Father look at each other and proclaim, in anguish, "She… She must go to Russia… now!" Five years later I find myself hunched over my desk, intermittently glancing out the frosty-cornered window overlooking Novgoradskaya Ulitsa. I'm distracted by the call of my lover, Andrei (or is that Sergei, Alexei, Ivan…?), who asks me if I want lenten plokhlebka for dinner, or perhaps we could dine out at our favorite Soviet-chich café, Politburo? After a bitter argument involving smashed bottles of vodka and trays of caviar violently slung onto the walls, Andrei and I break up. Devastated, I pack my things and board train #118 from the Varshavsky Station. The next morning I wake up in Poland but arrange a transfer to Paris the next day. And so the saga of my European life continues- I hop from the chicest apartment in St. Petersburg to les quartiers pauvres de Paris, the red rooves of Prague to my Best Friend's flat in London. Somewhere along the way I fall in love with the cooperative policies of EU citizenship, the preserved buildings more ancient than America itself, and the numerous deep-eyed specimens that haunt my bed at night. And I never come back.