NO

It started on a ferry.
I was coming home from the final party after high school. Three years with the same people, and now it was over. I was hungover. The sea was calm, a little grey, a little rainy — but the kind of rainy that feels good when you’re standing outside with the wind in your face. I looked at my friends and I knew, without really knowing, that something was ending.
We docked. Everyone got picked up by their parents or jumped on a bus. Paths that had run together for three years split apart in a parking lot — quietly, without ceremony. People just went home, tired and hungover.
I walked along the beach to my grandparents’ house in Snaptun. A narrow path, the water on one side, and that particular feeling of a chapter closing behind you.
My grandparents had built the house themselves. The kitchen was old, custom-fitted the way people used to do things — not perfect, but made with their own hands. My grandmother spent a lot of time in that kitchen. Family dinners, Sunday lunches, all of it. It was just part of who she was. Or so I thought.
I had a nap on the sofa. When I woke up I walked into the kitchen and found her at the stove. The way she was always at the stove. And I said something — the kind of thing you say without thinking:
“You must love being in the kitchen.”
She turned around. Not angry. Not hurt. Just honest.
“No.”
One word. And then silence.
I was surprised. I asked her — if not the kitchen, what had she actually wanted? What were her dreams?
And then something unexpected happened. She started talking. For ten, maybe fifteen minutes. My grandmother, who never said much, stood at that stove and told me about her life. The life she had wanted. The life she didn’t get.
She had wanted to be a football referee. She was born in the 1930s, and women weren’t allowed. They told her she couldn’t blow hard enough into the whistle. She had wanted to be a nurse. Her parents wouldn’t allow that either. So she became a housewife. She found a man — my grandfather. She built a life. A good life, by most measures.
But not the one she had imagined.
I was eighteen. I hadn’t asked her what I should do with my life. She didn’t tell me to follow my dreams — it wasn’t that kind of conversation. But something shifted in me in that kitchen. Standing there, listening to a woman who had spent decades being practical and quiet and present for everyone else, I understood something I couldn’t quite put into words yet.
I didn’t want to end up telling someone about all the things I had wanted to do.
I wanted to be able to tell them what I had actually done.
A few days later, on the Monday, I started shooting a TV series. A scriptwriter had been following the football team I played for and wanted to make a drama — real people playing characters they could believably be. I went to the casting. I got a part. Not as an actor, but as something in between — someone real, playing someone fictional, in a world I actually knew.
The first day of shooting, we went into the locker room. My teammates were the extras. We had been in that room together hundreds of times. But that day something was different. I was on camera. They were in the background. And I felt it — clearly, for the first time — that I was on a different path.
One of those teammates went on to become the most decorated player in the history of the local club. A legend in our area. His path was football. It was clear and straight and he followed it all the way.
Mine was something else. Something harder to describe. Something that started that summer — on a ferry, in a kitchen, in a locker room — and has been unfolding ever since.
That month was the beginning of me being a drifter. Of following an unusual path. Of choosing the unpredictable over the safe.
This is Episode 1 of My Life as a Drifter. I’m Jan Korgaard.
And remember — life is an unpredictable detour.