Hannah was lying on her back under the sky that was slowly lighting up. The sun would rise in a couple of hours and she should get going soon, the kids in Banana Bungalow wouldn't want to wait for breakfast. After just a week of staying she felt she knew the hostel like a home. On the other hand, she had always felt like home anywhere she left her stuff - were it house-boats where she and her parents had lived when she was a child, the tent they had built and switched from one place to another when someone told them they had overstayed their welcome (usually the park guards, and with a pretty stern voice), her friends' and lovers' houses... She assumed it was because she had never stayed anywhere long enough to have a concrete home - that lead to her home being the whole world.

She looked to her left side. The man lying next to her looked good in the starlight, even now when she was sobering up. She had met him on the night before at the campfires, they had talked a bit, one thing lead to another like beer had lead to grass and there they were, lying in a small hideout caused by the tide. She didn't want to wake him up. She didn't know his name, and she knew that he wanted nothing more from their relationship. If the fate would want so, they would meet again, they were, after all, in the same city. If not, that didn't matter so. It was fun, it was playing, it wasn't eternal love or any such thing.

Hannah rose, got dressed and walked quietly away, feeling the cold sand under her bare feet. She liked San Diego - the beaches, the people, the laid-back attitude. She would stay for another week or two. The hostel people had needed a cook and she was good at making breakfast, so they didn't charge for her stay or her beers, which made the place even more desirable. She knew she was running out of money sometime soon and in the next place she would need paid work. She would probably also need a ride there, so she was watching carefully the board with the announcements for cars going somewhere. The practical thing was, she didn't really care where she was going. Somewhere warm, preferably, but on the other hand she had always wanted to go to Washington or Wyoming, so that wouldn't be a problem either. As long as her flute and her painting things would fit it would be fine.

There was just one thing she worried about in San Diego. Just two days after her arrival she had been painting on the beach and an older man had come look at her paintings. He had praised them to heavens and after that Hannah had more or less accidentally run into her more often than she would've hoped. He had introduced himself as Karl, but hadn't gone further than that. She was, however, worried that he wanted something more, and more so because her friend Nana whom she knew since childhood and with whom she had travelled for the past couple of months, kept talking to her about how she should capture this rich gentleman and make him her patron. She laughed at her suggestions, but she couldn't completely ignore her when Karl's attentions kept coming.

She opened the hostel door with her own keys and tiptoed into the kitchen. She liked cooking, the natural magic there was, when the ingredients changed magically to something completely different when mixed well together. She started her daily routine of mixing pancake ingredients together and sang as she did so. The kitchen walls were pretty sound-proof, they had to be since most of the parties were held there, but in addition this allowed her to be pretty free in the early mornings. The hostel guests tended to sleep pretty late and they had the right to do so. For them this was a special adventure, a holiday or a gap year. To her this was life.

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