The ice over Iceland is eternal. At least in his eyes, the man escaping from who knows what. This one who met people he thought was never going to meet again and walk along the Thames with hunger.

Perhaps, he was looking for a new land. Maybe just opening his eyes, distracting himself in the chances abroad. A foreigner: he didn’t dream to be one of them. He was proud of a flag, of a history, of a piece of land surrounded by coast and mountains. He was ready to stay there forever from the very beginning.

The language: He wasn’t ever ready to open his mouth for more new words and sounds. He would have considered a nightmare the idea of being in front of other people speaking English for more than an hour. A nightmare.

Sometimes, in the new room where he stayed for a couple of years, the nightmare was about going back and being caught in his old land, not being able to come back to New York. All of a sudden, the dream was to stay in this new place, to hold hands with strangers, to get a new history.

Five in the morning: the alarm brought him back to the world of the real: A job. And he started a trip to a place where people called him by his name without knowing anything (anything!) about his life, his parents, his ideas, his successes, his failures. To start anew. To be someone else. To scratch the previous dream: to be a foreigner, a someone who barely could speak the language. To be the new stranger in the neighborhood.

On days like this, when he opens the curtains in the morning, and sees the first white of the snows on the ground, he always thinks about Iceland: the last stop coming from London to New York, before becoming an immigrant, a stutterer.

The morning when the plane landed at Reykjavik airport, he was looking at the eternal ice of Iceland as a free man for the last time. The next stop, in New York, he decided to stay and to become someone else. And he did.