wherever you go, there you are
It’s May 26th, 2022, and I’m staring out a train window at the rural French countryside churning by me. There are gnarls of vines strangling trees that probably aren’t Virginia Creepers but have the same suffocating feel, and fields planted with blue-ish grass, densely peppered with yellow blooming weeds. We flicker between bucolic towns with white-washed walls and industrial areas with tangled power lines. I should be soaking in the greenery but I’m wrestling with a particularly bad bout of travel anxiety. Typically I’m well suited to my style of movement, but I had a viscerally real feeling anxiety dream the night before where everything I had pieced together crumbled apart - the residual feelings are knocking around in my body even if the specifics of the mishaps from the dream have faded away.
Once the spiral starts, my only solution is to ride it out, and the silent train, the good Internet connection, my detailed maps and instructions all work together to slow my brain down and bring me back to a better baseline. I find a row to myself, a spot for my clunky suitcase, and my jitters recede. I inhale, I exhale, I get it together.
I’m almost two weeks into a ten week long trip, slowly traveling and working through Europe. A law student is subletting my room for the summer and my boss is generously accommodating my scattered working hours while I migrate from one quick home to another. I keep thinking about a conversation I had a few weeks prior, in a friend’s backyard, at a party, inevitably talking about the trip. My friend asks me: where do you think this comes from? The desire to traipse around, city to city. My answers come up short - for as much as I’ve thought about the trips I want to take, the travel I want to do, I’ve made little progress on the why behind it. Why not, my mind defensively jumps to? I’m capable and able and so I should. I want to see the world; I think this is an interesting way to do it. I won’t always have this degree of freedom, so I should seize it. I’ve gotten a taste of it, and I’ve loved it. For all of its bouts of loneliness, homesickness, rootlessness, it’s an extraordinary way to dip your toes in every little area of the world. If I’m being uncharitable, it also serves as a great conversational topic for first dates, a fun little nugget to drop into conversation at dinner parties. Oh, you lived in a different city every month for about a year? What an interesting, fun person you must be. If I think pragmatically - I do well in environments where I live under a bit of pressure. I respond well to a fire under my ass. I thrived in high stress, full speed ahead work environments. I like the challenge of pushing the boundaries of what a good and beautiful way of living might look like. I want to feel like I've tried every way of living so I know what the best life imaginable looks like, so I can build that for myself.
As I meet people when I travel, I don’t ask or answer the question much. There’s some shared understanding. The world is big, my time is short, I go because I can.
My journey to get to my first stop is multi pronged - a car ride to Union Station, a train, a shuttle to the airport. I successfully get checked in and wander around the weirdly empty Baltimore airport. A podcaster rambles in my ear; some of her words snag my attention: “Humans are humans,” she says languidly. “Humans are always in the same place eternally. That’s why we can still read Plato.” It’s as if the universe is telling me - keep your expectations tempered. There’s no reason that by picking up and moving to a different place that you’ll become a wholly different person. But I imagine myself anyways, leaping through a field or running at dawn every day along foggy pastures, making a daisy chain or reading under a hundred year old tree. I eat a pre-flight dinner outside my gate, reading an old favorite book on my phone: “Of course I recalled the poem about how you can never escape yourself,” a character muses in the book. “Every place is the same because you are the one moving to that place.” I wonder if I should feel personally affronted.
I stand in line to board the plane, already hazy from my sleep medicine, about to cross some boundary, step over some threshold. I keep my eyes fixed towards the exit of the airport, by the security lines, as if I’m expecting someone to come sprinting from around the corner, bouquet in hand, ready to beg me to stay. But no one comes around the corner; I’m not sure who I would have expected to. I wind through the lines, I walk the plank, I find my seat. I sit down and shift from a state of “home” to being “not home”.
I’ve built such a nice little life for myself. Why am I doing this, again? Is “why not” anywhere close to a good answer? And then the plane takes off, the wine kicks in, and I’m asleep, and aloft.
First: a detour to rural France. A beautiful, restored chateau in Normandy operates as a coliving and coworking space for itinerant travelers - I’ve followed it for ages on social media, and it’s every bit as picturesque as its online presence. I keep my goals minimal for the week: stare at tons of nature, adjust to the time zones, quiet down my mind after a whirlwind of a last month in the States. The house is staffed by a group of warm, chatty European girls around my age who lead group dinners and early morning yoga classes for the rotating cast of travelers who pass through the chateau. I settle into a rhythm of quiet, solitary days. I spend some evenings with my housemates, an accumulation of young people from various European countries - we go to the nearby village and have crepes, then wine and beer at a local bar with a cover band playing American dad rock tunes. We careen around the bends of country roads in the dark, hollering with laughter at stupid moments. Half the time I barely know what I’m laughing at, but the feeling is universal, contagious, untranslatable. I’m content to sit in the backseat, smile easily, head against the cool glass window.
The property is sprawling, with little trails connecting crumbling buildings - the owners are a couple who inherited the property and are slowly chipping away at fixing up everything. I learn this is logistically complicated by the fact that many of the buildings have some specific historic designation, and that it requires an architect with specific historic qualifications to work on the renovation, and that there is a shortage of both said architects and funding for the said architects. In the absence of restoration, I peer into the courtyard of the stone church, where thickets of tall grass and wildflowers slowly ravage the centuries-old cemetery in front of the front steps. I work on my laptop at a foreboding oak table in the main room, feeling anachronistic without some kind of roast pig or medieval feast splay out in front of me as eleven empty ornate chairs stare at me from around the table. I come across a walled garden, overrun with thickets of roses in various states of blanketing the ground with petals. Palm trees tower over me on one of my walks, allegedly planted to alleviate the homesickness of a Spanish princess who married the castle’s owner centuries ago. My room is decorated like a gilded Tiffany box, with robin’s egg blue wallpaper traced with light gold flowery vines, and a four post bed with a simple white coverlet. I move the matching blue desk to the large windows, propped open to let the slightly cool air in, and lamely send emails while I watch clouds churn across the electric blue sky.
I don’t get homesick until the third morning. Would I even count it as homesickness? I just have pangs of something sharp in my stomach for a few hours, when I’m included in a group chat invitation for a backyard party I can’t go to, paired with a vivid dream about my ex, where I ask questions I don’t want to know the answer to. I wake up still simmering and force myself to keep thinking about the dream and feeling bad. I don’t have any other strategy for moving on then forcing my brain to envision it, like holding my hand to a burner, until I teach myself to not let it enter my mind to begin with. My new technique I’m trying: change continents, change time zones, get some escape velocity. There’s no possibility of turning corners and seeing anyone I don’t want to over here. I can’t stalk the streets of DC in sweaty, humid apprehension. It’s just me, my own shadow, a small cluster of Europeans that look at me politely and blankly when I speak too fast, too Southern, too idiomatically. I tamp down my accent, I simplify my sentence structure, and gesticulate enthusiastically. I find that my plan slowly starts to work. During the chilled, rainy days, I find I don’t have the same constant stream of chatter in my head I usually do. It’s as if the underlying hum of being somewhere unfamiliar is occupying the area of my brain grasping for constant stimulus.
I sit and work at my desk, and I watch a herd of horses gallop across the field in the distance. I see a stork dive past my window, aiming right towards me and then swooping up at the last minute towards the roof. I text my friends: “do you miss me yet”.
My train bears me away from the chateau, and I pledge gamely to my temporary housemates to keep in touch. The anxiety recedes kilometer by kilometer until I land in Paris. When I meet up with a friend who moved here a few years ago, I hug them tightly and lengthily. We wander around Paris, trying to find a place to grab a drink that isn’t closed due to the local holiday Annunciation Day, blasphemously grousing about the Lord interrupting our plans to get a reasonably priced glass of wine. Our conversation runs long, and I have to speed walk back to my shoebox hotel to get on a Zoom call to discuss payroll systems for an opera company in Canada. I almost break into a jog and launch myself indiscriminately across intersections to make it back in time as the sun starts to set, barely darkening the perpetually gray skies. I see myself flit past in the reflection of closed stores’ glass windows and can’t help but laugh at the sight. It’s a funny jolt to catch a glimpse of myself here, on this street, on this night - there’s a disconnect between my mind being here and seeing my body in this space. I hear it echoing in my head: wherever I go, there I am, there I am, there I am again. I join the call, slightly out of breath and dizzy from the glass of wine on an empty stomach, and the Canadians join the line, buzzing and irate. “See what I did there,” I text my little sister, interning for my company, after getting the group wrangled and satisfied, walking them through the plan point by point until their fears stopped hollering in their ears. “Good job,” she wrote back, nonplussed.
Paris is empty when I wake up at six the next morning to catch a bus to the airport. The sky remains stubbornly gray but slowly brightens. There are no cars to dodge as I lug my suitcase crossing cobbled roads, and I wait only a few minutes with a large cluster of travelers at the same bus stop, grumbling quietly about the delayed bus in about ten different languages, before the shuttle arrives.
On my flight to Zurich, I doze off blearily, lulled to sleep by the quiet hum of the plane and the warm cabin air. With nothing to lean against, I jolt awake awkwardly a few times, more than once startling the lanky Swiss boy sitting next to me. He seems shy - neither of us start conversation - but when I wake up from my fractured nap, he hands me a piece of chocolate distributed by the flight attendants while I dozed. “I saved one for you,” he said, smiling a small smile.
On my flight to Palermo, I sit next to a small family - a father and son in my row, and a mother and daughter in the rows behind me. I abstractly try to pick up the bits of my school German I remember from their chatter. The boy pressed his face against the window while we take off, watching the ground shrink below us with saucer eyes. The wife reaches her hand over the seat towards the husband and he laces his fingers in hers, then pulls her hand closer and presses his lips to the gold band on her ring finger. I look away, feeling like I’m intruding, my heart pangs, I feel very by myself.
I read a book of essays on the flight about a woman who moves to Wyoming to become a cattle rancher after her husband dies. “What I had lost (at least for a while) was my appetite for the life I had left: city surroundings, old friends, familiar comforts. It had occurred to me that comfort was only a disguise for discomfort; reference points, a disguise for what will always change,” she writes. I wonder what my friends are doing at home.
The chateau hosts back in Normandy describe a woman that they met - another itinerant traveler - who scoffed when asked what she does for work. How boring, she accused the asker. “Rather, you should ask: “what do you do in life?” Work does not define us.” When asked: “what do you do in life?” she responses, arms flung out, “I live life”, drawing out the “live” dramatically. I catch glimpses of myself in the mirror of elevators, above my bathroom sink, in dark glassy windows of shops I walk past. Living life, I say to myself, as my face flits in and out of view. I spot myself in the reflection of my laptop screen, in the train window when we go through a pitch black tunnel. Here I am, it’s always just me here, stacking days on top of more days one at a time, living my life, arms flung wide, reaching for empty air.