A month ago I was literally falling in love with a tall dark foreigner on a beach off the coast of Vietnam. We had rented a tandem kayak and paddled across the cove to a small island for the afternoon. I alternated reading the pages of a book with allowing disparate glances to where our eyes met and my heart could go all aflutter. I was unabashedly drunk on it, I sent a message to my friend, "How disgustingly brilliant is my life?"
I love traveling because on the road that scene above is normal. People who live in their backpacks, they measure reality in a different metric. We can fall in love on a beach--with a lover, a friend, a particular wave that falls upon the sand in perfect timing with the last rays of the sun. We can keep that feeling alive. I believe we can keep it alive.
Could I even keep mine past the beach? I had to leave, or rather, I had bought a ticket home, and I chose to use it. It was a choice, but it didn't feel that way. A series of seemingly inconsequential decisions had set too many things in motion and I was swirling, caught up in inertia just trying to hold my hands over my ears to protect my head, maybe my heart. I had to go home because I had a carload of stuff sitting in a house in Colorado that I was no longer renting, and I had to drive it to a school in Minnesota where I had told administration I was attending. Because I had told my family I was going to become a physical therapist and get a real job and a career and they agreed that was a good idea.
I cried at the airport when I left, but I left.
My plane arrived in Denver at eight in the morning and I just, didn't know...so I went to the bar and I ordered a couple beers before walking to passenger pick-up where my sort of still and maybe again, but mostly ex-boyfriend waited outside in his new truck. We broke up for a few reasons, but mostly I grew tired of inviting him to join me in my wanderlust. He never had time, never had the money, but when I was gone he bought things like heliskiing trips in Alaska or a shiny new pickup truck. Momentum can't hide the fact that we make choices. Kissing him hello was weird, because I almost didn't love him anymore and I almost loved someone else, and we both knew I was leaving.
A week ago from now and a few days after that, I packed the last of my things from the house that had once been ours, my mostly ex-boyfriend and me, and I drove back home to Minnesota. I hated the miles that sank below the tires of my worn out Subaru and I hoped that it would finally kick it, break down on the side of the road, or spin out on its threadbare tread and eject me high in the sky. I would never land. I would just float.
The defeat of moving back in with my parents in my hometown at the age of 29 is a kick in the stomach that leaves me curled up on the bathroom floor, listening to running water, filling the space with steam. I start my first day in a doctoral program for physical therapy tomorrow and I do not want to go. Advantage after advantage has been thrown my way, but I just want to escape.
And I would run. Except, I can't tell if I want to run because it's what I need, or if I want to run because I'm scared I won't succeed.
I chose to come home because I wanted to go to the source, to meet the ghosts where they live. I don't know if what I'm doing is right, but I know I'm always leaving and right now I am trying to go back. It is not a strong argument. I don't feel like a strong person, but I manage to get off of the floor and take a shower.
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