NAU NUA: LINKA A ODOM aka TheMissingLinka

El Hierro

I’m sitting in a pension on an Island in Spain; it is one of the Canary Islands, El Hierro. It is the smallest of the Islands, filled with volcanic rocks, trees and expansive views of the ocean. It is sunny here around 363 days a year, I have been here since Saturday, it is Thursday, it has been cloudy the whole time, in fact raining, I haven’t sat in the sun yet. On Monday Japan experienced the worst Earthquake ever in recorded history, the Nuclear reactor Fukushima failed, people are going to get sick from radiation poisoning, people are dying, displaced. Today I almost starting crying because I got on the wrong bus and wasted 3 hours of my life, I threw my bag, I pouted, I went on a walk, breathed deeply, thought about Japan and decided to shut the fuck up. The bus driver bought me a cappuccino and didn’t charge me for the correct bus, then he gave me his phone number and told me to call him if I had any problems. I arrived in La Restinga at my pension, I hung up my clothes to air out and dry. I reconsidered why I was here. Today I will officially begin the novel that I have been writing on and off for twenty years. As I finished the first part of Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy today, I recall the motivation for this delayed process. Auster writes about his character; “He wondered what the map would look like of all the steps he had taken in his life and what word it would spell.”

Linka A Odom , March 17th 2011

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All images courtesy of and selected by Linka A Odom