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.