I've always been attracted to the air, the mere feeling inside airports. The freedom. I don't just mean the fact you are equally as valid buying a coffee at 8 pm as you are buying a beer at 6 am. For one, the diversity inside an airport is unmatched by any one place in the world. People are coming and going from their countries and cities, passing through, never staying, yet we are all there for the same reason. As different as I am from every person on my flight, I am the same in one way: location. These were the kinds of thoughts that overtook my brain the day I flew from Portland, Oregon to Barcelona, Spain. 18 then, alone, excited, scared, and apparently in a philosophical headspace. While everyone on that flight headed towards the same location, only one eighteen-year-old girl moved across the world alone for her education. I didn't feel any sort of regret, perpetual fear, yeah. Distinctly, I understood my entire life would change completely when my flight landed. I'd had transitional life periods before, moving cities with my family for example, or the summer between middle school and high school. Nothing from my past could even attempt to compare to that flight. It was as if I'd walked out of the front door of my house only to look back and see an abyss. There was no return, only advancement. Creating a life in a new country as an eighteen-year-old with no family, friends, or support system might seem like an impossible task, an entirely undesirable one, but to me, it just screamed freedom--opportunity. No set path meant choices. For the first time in my life, I could be and do exactly what I wanted. Now, to be clear, this wasn't an overnight impulsive decision. I did put a lot of thought into my overseas move. Two months prior I'd been admitted into Geneva Business School in Barcelona. I had a Residency Visa for Spain. I'd already put a downpayment down on a room in a shared apartment in Barrio Gotic. I felt prepared, more or less. Moving Abroad proved to have its difficulties. For one, my Spanish lacked fluency. My free time was spent entirely alone, and I no longer looked at the same sky as my family and friends back home. Yet, Barcelona, as I describe it now, is just like an airport. While alone, I never felt lonely. Barcelona´s residents, being 27% foreigners, welcomed me with open arms. Walking the corridors of the city's oldest district (with buildings older than my entire country) felt like a dream. Five days after my arrival, I began my first day at the University. My school, being the private business school it is, attracts a lot of foreigners. The seats in my classes filled up with people from Sweden, Egypt, India, Brazil, and basically every country you can think of. In a class of twenty students, eighteen nationalities were present. My school held one more highly desirable trait: Every single one of us wanted companionship. We were all new to Barcelona. Before the end of the first week, I was getting coffee with classmates and planning weekend outings with a group of girls. Now, as I learn the local language, study Entrepreneurship, and live in the only place I've ever felt truly happy, I can say without a single doubt I made the right choice. Things settled, as they always do, in the exact way they were supposed to. Could I have just gone to OSU in Oregon? Yes, of course. Did I have to choose one of the most intense and difficult paths in my life? No, but I wanted to. I live with a constant feeling of FOMO. My life doesn't feel nearly long enough. I am constantly in a desire for the best, most unique experiences to fill out my life. To me, the string of memories that my life will be in the end is all that matters.

Imagine two friends, one on Mars and one on Earth. A silent vacuum separates the two. How could they possibly keep their friendship from cooling off? The answer seems obvious. We now have the technology to send a message from one planet to another faster than it takes to roast a chicken. Online messages are instant and almost entirely free. Is the Internet then the best way of preserving long distance friendships? My friend does not live on Mars, but in a foreign country on Earth. We became friends at a language school in Spain, where people would hang out after class, have lunch and go to tapas bars. It was here that Lorenzo and I bonded. Conversation was fluid, laughs were plentiful. We were both students of philosophy, and it seemed to be the start of a long friendship. But after three weeks everything was interrupted. My time at the school was over, and I was leaving Spain. Would Lorenzo and I stay friends, or would our communication fizzle out across the seas and continents? The day before I left we met in the shadow of the great cathedral. As we stood there and talked we decided we would keep in touch. And we did, in a way. Thinking that instant messages were the easiest, and therefore the best way of staying connected, we started doing what most people do and tried to keep a steady stream of chat messages going. But the chat had a way of exhausting our communication. Our once interesting conversations became superficial. The messages lacked gravity, were carelessly typed and sprinkled with emoticons that somehow cheapened everything. In the end we grew weary of messaging each other. After a while I started wondering about the best way to preserve a long distance friendship. With today´s technology it should be a simple matter, even if one of us lived on Mars. After all, “staying in touch” is easier than ever. Where messages once travelled at the speed of horse hooves or pigeon wings, or even by the wheels of a motorcar, they now travel on the backs of electrons. But as my friendship with Lorenzo was fraying, I started wondering if it's not just a matter of staying in touch, but of how you stay in touch. I kept wondering how people did it in the past, when there was only paper and pen. This led me to an idea that felt hopelessly old fashioned and somewhat insane, but the more I thought about it, the more convincing it seemed. The idea was classical, yet radical, timeless, yet behind the times. The idea was to write letters. Of course I had my doubts about it. This was not a mere postcard with a few lines about my holiday. There would be whole pages in which I mused about some philosophical issue, wrote about life and asked Lorenzo to share what he wanted. I had never written quite this way to anyone before, and it made me feel vulnerable. Who did this sort of thing today? To my great surprise Lorenzo liked the idea. It took a month for the mailman to deliver his reply, but the long wait only increased the significance of the words. He wrote about feeling much more open and honest in a letter than on his phone, and it showed. Suddenly there was a fullness to our communication that had been absent online. There was no longer any limit to how deep or complex one could get. We started writing about the meaning of the alphabetic symbols. We wrote in depth about our lives. And somehow, what I had thought impossible was happening: despite the distance, our friendship was growing. In the past I would have thrown myself in the couch and typed a few lines on the phone with an emoticon or two. It was cheap and easy, and no proof that I valued the friendship more than that. The instant nature of it was an upside, but it paled in significance to sitting down at a desk, grabbing a pen and shutting off all distractions to write a thought out letter that would survive into the future as a testimony to our shared existence on this earth. Every time I sat down to write a letter I felt strangely present. I disappeared into a calm vortex, feeling very much “outside” the frantic rush of the day, connected only to my recipient. And the whole process of writing the letter and paying for its journey was a tangible proof of how one valued the friendship. Furthermore, the handwritten lines conveyed metainformation that the standardised digital fonts lacked. How straight, thin or ugly the letters are, how hard you press with the pen, all these things can show sadness or peace, stress or pedantry, almost like a body language of the pen. The Internet is very good for “staying in touch”. But when it comes to keeping friendships alive, a handwritten letter can offer the next best thing to meeting face to face. So how could a Martian stay friends with an Earthling? I believe handwritten letters would be an effective and down to earth solution, if only a mail service were to be established between the planets. Friendship must to be nourished by a sense of presence, even when we feel separated by millions of miles.