247: After

We’ve been on the metaphorical road for 247 days. I’ve watched the sun set over ten countries, twenty one cities, a hundred parks, or at least that’s how it feels. I’ve danced across entire weekends in a blur of neon and the wrong shoes. I’ve watched the world stretch out lazily in front of me, posing as a golden ocean entirely without bound. I’ve seen the landscape shift, rising up in jagged edges to points that graze so close to heaven it looks like you could never pass. I’ve dipped my toe in the freezing water of Colombian caves and the salty sweet warmth of the beaches of Lagos. I’ve lost myself in the forlorn streets of Serbia, found myself in the pointed towers of Prague, let go of myself in the twisted medinas of Morocco.

I’ve been on the road for 247 days; but that means this journey only has 118 left.

What will you do when you’re done traveling? It’s a Facebook message, a text, an email, a whispered conversation when it’s late at night and we’ve had too much to drink and we’ve found the courage to talk about the thing that scares us most. What happens when you’re done? Done, done, done.

How can one be done traveling? Can you truly hear the name of a place you’ve never been without instantly losing a piece of your soul to its unfamiliarity? Can you sit at home without your mind wandering to a memory of a distant place, a distant past, a not-home that will always be home all the same? Can you feel the wind whip through your hair on a beach in Connecticut and not reminisce about how it felt as it worked itself into knots, snatching grains of sand from the Sahara as you sat at the peak of a sun-drenched dune?

What happens when you’re done? If I traveled to every place on this earth, to every city and remote village, swam in every ocean, drifted down every river, squeezed every grain of sand through my toes, I’d want to go back. Back, back, back.

There’s a threshold that exists in travel, an invisible one that hooks so many unwitting nomads all the same. There’s a line you cross, where you’ve seen too much, and your body and your heart and your entire being resist going back to the blindness that was before.

There is no after for me. I became something on this trip that I wasn’t before, floating from place to place, a body that can’t belong to a city or be bound by a border.

There’s no piece of me that craves stability. I don’t need the chains that so many people cling to to keep them safe. I don’t need a fence or a mortgage, or a reliable car. I don’t need a daily routine, a weekly ritual, a set of mundane habits. I don’t need things that are mine, or land to call my own. I don’t need a coffee shop where they know my order or a bar where they know my name. I don’t need to repeat myself, to do the same thing twice, to settle in, to settle down. All I need is a ticket, a passport, and the promise that I never have to wake up to the same view for long.

For me, there’s only more. More, more, more.

I want my skin so drenched with sunshine from faraway places that it leaks solid gold. I want my eyes drowned in so much beauty they spill over into photographs. I want my hands to try so many things they itch to type them into words.

What happens when you’re done?

Done, done, done.

Even when the day comes that my body can’t take another voyage on a bus through a mountain range, my eyes strain to see across the room, my feet grow tired at the thought of hiking in a golden field, I’ll wander. I’ll never be at home again. In my mind, I’ll always be here. In my mind, I’ll always be everywhere.

Where?

Where!

Where.