The Inner Traveller
Why these days I’m more interested in travel that doesn’t require a passport.
As a writer, my motivation occasionally trapdoors through the floor, hurtles down past the basement and settles somewhere deep into a layer of the Earth’s bedrock.
Particularly when (a) I’m feeling low and/or lost, and (b) events in broader society are batshit crazy, I decide, subconsciously or otherwise, “what could I possibly say that has any relevance?” and just stop.
I entered the new year ignoring all the “new year new me” bullshit. And 2021 has already proven not to be the magical heal-all I hoped for, anyway: This week, I tested positive for Covid-19, and one day later, watched online as something along the lines of an attempted coup took place at the United States Capitol. The idea of the new normal being anything as predictable and free as the old normal diminishes by the day.
Maybe the new normal will never come. Maybe, it already has.
At one point, travel was an essential, central aspect of how I see myself. Full passports, endless road trips, always planning my next adventure. I am one of those assholes who loves discussing the worst ever layover, or the most inconvenient flight cancellation, or the most annoying rerouting. Travel always brought a low-rumbling thrill: adventure and the unknown formed an important part of my identity.
Sometimes, if I was feeling low, I’d check the price of flights to Istanbul for March, or ascertain how much the going booking.com rate was for a room in Banff next week. Even the possibility of travel soothed my soul.
On Wednesday, while watching the bizarrely quiet images of criminals breaking and entering the Capitol, I surreptitiously pulled up a favorite website: Google Flights. I tapped in a few favorite destinations: Lisbon, Amsterdam, Adelaide, Rio de Janeiro. Covid-19 warnings!!!! dominated the screen.
I clicked around, pretending there was any chance of me actually booking anything. For a little while, it felt good, to contemplate boarding a plane and leaving this confusing, pandemic-ridden country behind.
But I didn’t.
Partly because leaving the US means ending my 6-month-old marriage (I am not allowed to travel outside the US until the next round of the visa process commences, which could be months and depends entirely on bureaucratic processes beyond the scope of my control).
Partly, as I realized while I hacked around wondering what the hell I was really looking for, because nowhere I could go would be home. Because now, home is here.
Travel’s pull on me feels like a spider web: delicate yet powerful. It still holds the allure of an intrinsic sense of new possibility and freedom that comes with leaving and arriving and leaving again.
Now, my journey is inward, which is both tedious and far less overtly interesting than a trip to Acapulco, or Florianópolis, or Lhasa. But right now, it is also much more valuable.
In different times, I might have run away. Now, as I craft my own, personal new normal, I stay.
