Two and a half months ago, I was riding in the back of a truck from Vientiane, Laos, to the train station. It was a large pick up truck that had been converted by adding a bench running down each side of the bed. I was in the last seat at the back, holding onto the pole that supported the shade structure above me. The sun was hot and slanting in against my face. The sky was a brilliant blue, and we passed farms, trees, and domestic elephants as we drove.
All that I could think about was how bored I was.
Hemingway, who, amongst other things, portrayed a louche and drifting expat existence in his books, has a famous story called "
Hills like White Elephants." It's a stunningly concise piece that places a pregnancy as the catalyst that sheds light on the different desires of two people.
"It tastes like licorice," the girl said and put the glass down.
"That's the way with everything."
"Yes," said the girl. "Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you've waited so long for, like absinthe."
"Oh, cut it out."
"You started it," the girl said. "I was being amused. I was having a fine time."
"Well, let's try and have a fine time."
"All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?"
"That was bright."
"I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it--look at things and try new drinks?""I guess so."
In the story, the male character is pressuring his girlfriend to get an abortion so they can go on traveling and leading their lives. She is unsure.
I'd begun to feel like that woman. There are people who can travel their whole lives. I know and love many such people. For a while I thought I was like that, too. And then some changes in my circumstance, set in motion early in this calendar year, began to work on me. At first I just thought I was going through a transition, irritable but soon to recover and carry on as before. It took me nearly six months to realize what was really going on.
"Everything tastes of licorice."
Exploring felt like a chore. I was tired, introverted. I'd stopped cultivating new connections --what was the point? soon I'll be gone -- and had lost my energy to pick up new skills. At some point I realized that airports and airplanes felt more like home than anywhere in the world, and I don't mean that as hyperbole: the second I got on line to check in, something in me would unclench and I would relax into the joy of knowing exactly how to navigate every situation that would present itself to me in the next 10 to 20 hours.
I'd begun to thrill on the rush of leaving, only to feel cold and depressed on arrival.
It took a long time for me to understand all of this. Travel, or more specifically, living in new places, has been motivating me since I was a teen-ager. It's been my guiding principle, the one thing in my life that all other things were arranged around. I grew up in a bedroom suburb; both of my parents had moved there from other places. They worked in the city. It was a good childhood, and a pleasant one, but one that felt like waiting. Waiting for my turn to go out and find a place for myself.
When it did come time to leave, it felt impossible to simply go and pick a place to live. How could I make that sort of decision without knowing what my options were? Thinking about all the places I didn't know made me itchy, aggravated so I couldn't sleep. Like Conrad's narrator in Heart of Darkness, I couldn't take my mind off of the blank places on the map. Seeing the shape of a country and not being able to add the colors and smells and sounds to those bare lines gave me a deep anxiety. I was missing something, I was always missing something, and every second I wasn't off somewhere was a second wasted.
And so I left for a series of places that it never occurred to me to consider home. First, northwest Pennsylvania, where I attended school and gaped (to the sometimes amusement, sometimes annoyance of my friends) at the rural world. Then, France, a country I loved but where I could never find a real emotional foothold. San Diego, a city of compromise, where I and a boyfriend slowly learned that meeting halfway means no one is happy. New Zealand, a dreamland of landscapes, where I met multiple transplanted North Americans who had been tearfully airborne over the Pacific while members of their family passed away. Chile, a culture I loved more as an ongoing intellectual dilemma than as a sustainable life choice. And then, at a hyperactive pace, San Francisco (where I failed to create a base of local friends), Costa Rica (where I learned that small towns by the beach make me dull and lethargic), China (where I watched with fascination a culture I had no interest in entering), Istanbul (where I was defeated by the Turkish language), and Thailand (where I had to relearn the lesson about small towns by the beach).
And all of a sudden I was 27, I hadn't been in love in three years, I rarely saw most of my good friends, I spent many hours cultivating acquaintanceships that I knew would shortly be ending, and the things that had driven me up to that point -- curiosity, adrenaline, and the careful cultivation of my own mental landscapes -- were just not enough anymore.
Of course, I pause here to assure you that it was all worth it. Non, rien de rien. Non, je ne regrette rien. This decade-long (perhaps life-long) obsession of mine has shaped everything about the way I now relate to myself, to others, and to the world.
But it's time to confront a new identity for myself. I always felt it, that there was something odd about me for a traveler: while my truly nomadic friends were purging themselves of possessions at every chance, I was buying posters and putting them in storage. In some corner of my mind, there has always been an apartment, filled with my books and large plants. When I was eight I was walking down a street in Boston with my family one night, and at a lit window there was a young woman in sweats painting her walls. I don't know why I decided this, but I thought to myself, "It's her first apartment. Someday that will be me."
It's time to move somewhere and mean it. Again, with feeling....
Riding in the back of the truck, my eyes were barely focused on the scenery flying by. As I sweat in the Laotian sun, my pulse was quickening as I thought of all the things I was going to do, the things I was going to have. Hobbies. Friends. Lovers. A gym membership. A subway pass. A telephone. A steady address. Magazine subscriptions. Bookshelves. Plants. Everything was going to change.
