the push, the pull and everything in between

Rain fell over the Chicago River as I made my way down the Union Station train platform with the last fifteen months of my life in tow this morning. Last summer, I left Detroit with three carry-on sized bags to travel the world and today I return.

In the time since I left, I’ve grown so used to the gentle weight, inertia and inconvenience of everything that I carry with me — the rickety left wheel on my roller bag, the way my hiking backpack lists-and-sways while I walk, the floping of my hats and shoes as they dangle from it — that I hardly notice them anymore. For some people home is a big house in the countryside, others a small apartment in an urban thicket, but for me it has become the things on my back and wherever I lay my head at night.

During my time with Remote Year, I traveled over 107,000 kilometers to 25 countries across six continents. In the month after my contract ended, I visited three Hawaiian islands before driving 8,600 miles through some 20 US states with Thad. Now, I have a 270 mile train ride before I return to the [literal] bed that I left behind.

When I boarded the train this morning, I felt the tension of a year’s worth of travel come down to a string pulled taught between the place that raised me, the place that made me and everything that had happened in between.

My life of unbridled travel began three Decembers ago when Kelly and I took a Mini-Cooper Coupe from Detroit to Seattle for a hundred bucks. We drove through Snoqualmie Pass into Seattle on New Year’s Eve and got matching tattoos two days later. The tattoos — a line of our route from Google Maps with a solid dot marking every place we spent a night — resemble a constellation tracing the veins in our arms.

It would be cliche to marry my inclination to travel with the blood coursing through my veins, but this is normal for me now — an unplotted constellation of people, places and experiences forming my reality.

Anyone who commits themselves to travel has to reflect on the tension between chasing their dreams and running from their problems sooner or later; I’ve spent much of the last year doing that and now I sit here, in this train car, at peace with the push, the pull and everything in between