This is a work of fiction

At first, they said no flights would leave Europe for 24 hours.  I first heard about the volcanic eruption on Iceland by accident, early Friday afternoon.  Tired and begging for some entertainment, I found the only English-speaking channel available on Crete, BBC News.  I was surprised that the first I heard of this major international event was rolling across the ticker at the bottom on the screen  while watching a special on surfing in Scotland.  The official British stance, despite over 17,000 flights cancelled that day, was "We'll be looking into it first thing Monday." The brush-off colored my mood for the next few days.  I was distracted myself with Cretian artifacts and museums and archeological sites, but alone, at night before sleeping, or drying off after a shower, my thoughts of the uncertain lingered.

A day became two weeks.  Meteorologists reassured the press that the volcanic ash would shift east and south, eventually rising into the jet stream and dispersing into the ozone, making the skies safe again for air travel.  What they hadn't counted on however, was the length of the eruption.  Most people didn't realize it at the time, but a volcanic eruption isn't just a sudden burst of lava, but a slow dance between earth and air.  

I watched from my second home in Athens, the outdoor coffee shop Cafe Acropolis, as the sky behind the Parthenon faded, day after day, from the cuerelean blue Greece was famous for to this white-gray haze, hiding the moon, the stars, and eventually even the sun the Greeks had worshipped for millenia.  The satellite pictures I downloaded showed the stream of ash spiralling down from the Atlantic across the Northern Hemisphere, only to be reach the equator over Southeast Asia and be swept back up again.  Like a marble, I thought, a sad, beautiful marble.

I began to watch my spending more carefully, lest I had to extend my stay.

Weeks became months.  Patience was wearing thin among those displaced.  In the beginning, airline companies purchashed cruise lines to bring wary travellers home, but piracy reimmerged with force as ship after ship was raided.  American tourists and their fat wallets had not gone unnoticed.  Meanwhile, naval navigation immerged as the new most powerful geopolitical tool as satellites, unable to be maintained, faltered.  All commercial ship travel eventually ended completely.  The offical stance of the American government shifted from rescue to integration.  Many people were angry.  Several American embassies were bombed, including the one in Athens.  A group called the American Relocation Group claimed responsibility, apparently travelling American students like myself, angry the government had not done more to intervene, took matters into their own hands, damning us all.  The Department of International Defense, issued a statement that all displaced American students should be considered dangerous and potentially threats to both local and international political powers.  Some feigned membership and turned themselves in, desparate to go back to America, reasoning that coming home as a domestic terrorist is better than never going home at all.

Most of my fellow classmates had left Greece by now out of fear, scattering across Europe, seeking out friends of friends or settling in slums populated by other like-minded and displaced travellers.  Those that stayed in Greece did not acknowledge me, as they had already begun their new lives here and it was too painful to see a face of a place they would not return.