Away

During a midweek lunch break in June of 2003 I took Him and a yellow Post-It note to a travel agent. It had only these few pencil scrawled words upon it:

WED 23RD
EUROPE
INDIA
USA

So this is what the beginnings of an adventure of a lifetime look like.

I left Trailfinders that day with a ‘round the world ticket. I resigned from my job and left the country three weeks later. Weighed down with a backpack I could barely carry and a heart I could hardly bear. The promise of the wait of the world shifted from my future to my present. I flew past cloud nine, across time zones and toward no date of return, holding on to the belief that I wouldn’t last more than three months.

I was going Away. Where? Away. It’s a place. It’s located anywhere but here. Why? To see the colours and the cultures, to taste the foods and to meet the friends I’d never meet if I stayed here. And I was hungry, starving for the new and the different and for the flavours of life I was yet to taste, the sounds of words I was yet to understand and rhythms of life I was yet to feel. The fork driving the wanting to go into going had three tines, one was the exhausted shadow of myself that I had become, two was the fact that my little sister had beaten me to it and the third was in the shape of a man. I needed to feel alive and inspired, I needed to chase what I really wanted and I needed to escape what was dragging me down. This friendship between Him & I had become an addiction of the most pleasurably destructive kind. One of us had to break the bond and that one was me. He never thanked me for that, or at least that’s what I thought then.

I’d spoken to people that had gone away for years at a time. Three months seemed an age to me. Away from your family! Your country! So many weeks, so many days. I knew I was not one of those people. I simply didn’t have a desire to live away from my life or my family as much as I thought I wanted to see the world. I remember when my older sister went to Switzerland, Paris, Germany and God only knows where else. She was away for my twenty first birthday, she was a way for a lot, the weeks seemed to last forever, well, a quarter of a year to be exact.

Years later I would learn that home misses you more than you miss home. What home sees as days lost, you see as days gained. Days stolen from the uncounted days of normal life. To get the fuck out of your everyday shucks the oyster’s shell for you. Being introduced into other peoples lives and just living on a daily basis in a different environment is the perfect way to evade the heavy and escape the petty. And this is but a fringe benefit of the exotic, carefree, fun-filled bubble you’ve flown into the core of.

A journey through my notebooks

I am sure all my fellow-bloggers will see a little of themselves in Julie Powell. What project can we take on to get us through the next year and serendipitously land us a literary agent and a book contract? Are we not all writers in waiting? Artists in our own residence? Yes, my passion is cooking, I've thousands of recipes in (yet) uncooked from books and magazines...but that's been done now. It still amazes me, that whether people read your blog or not, you are still in a way, published. Self published. For years now I have been writing, filling notebooks and taking one with me wherever I go. But nothing has inspired me more than travel.

I used to sit on my bed in my parents house, tearing out articles on Morocco and India, dying at the mounds of colourful spices and the alien brightness of women swathed in saris. Where golden jewels pierced through noses and ears were commonplace and beautiful rather than a symbol of non-conformism as it is here. I used to pore through them in the privacy of my bedroom when my boyfriend was at football training or out with the boys. He didn't want these adventures. They belonged to me. I wanted more.

I could almost smell the headiness of the souks through the pages and in some way, I think I escaped into them then and there for just a little while. I naively, never thought it a waste to methodically tear and squirrel away these pages. I just knew, one day, I would be there. I didn't know when or how (then again, I've never been into practicalities). I used to rank my top three places, revise them and re-rank them and I settled on these...Paris, Morocco, India.

I invite you to come on a journey with me...through the best years of my life. I knew it then just as I know it now.

"They will be the best years of your life," he said. I wasn't convinced.

"You wait until I get back, I am going to be so wordly".

"You think because you haven't seen the world that I don't think you're wordly?"

I thought I loved that boy and that's why I left.