Each time I step out in a foreign country by myself reaffirms the kernel of self-reliance I carry with me. If I can cross this busy-ass road in New Delhi,[1] I can teach this new daunting class at work. If I can attempt to get a sim card from Airtel after crossing the busy-ass road, I can handle my parents’ next health crisis.[2] If I can travel alone in India for more than two weeks, I can probably make it through the next five years of my life successfully—successfully meaning tending to my career, attempting a healthy lifestyle, continually maturing by being open to change and new people.
Travel isn’t about seeing something new as it is contrasting yourself to something new. The you that gets reflected back from the strange outer world is not the person reflected back in daily life at home. Necessarily.
Who needs such constant violent reminders of their capabilities? I don’t consciously. Not as strong as Belgium being purely an escape from family like it was for Jeremiah,[3] my urge to travel remains a built-in wanderlust that functions as a mild rejection from whence I came. All those years ago sitting in the high school gym as a freshman listening to some students tell their Belgian exchange stories, I conceived of Belgium as the most extreme option, the best option provided by my Christian high school to differentiate myself, and it would differentiate me more than going to punk shows, dressing in vintage clothes, dying my hair black, and accepting the freaks into my friend group. International travel appeared as a rejection of the social status quo. Yet in rejecting one’s origins, one subjects oneself to the violence of alienation. What can you live with? What can you live without? The more I have pushed myself to prove to myself I can do something that tests my limits,[4] the more I deprive myself from the known quantity and from stability. What a high! Delivering myself from the deprivation of comfort becomes a proxy for the biohacking substance abuse indulges in.[5]
Last time was cheating, except for Tenerife[6] (you have to fly off the coast of Africa to reach Spain in that case): London, Belgium, the Netherlands: the easy places with the familiar train stations and communicable languages. The time before that: Prague with a group of library school students: still cheating. The familiarity of western Europe demurs the violence of thrashing away the chaff from my self-reliance kernel. The violent absence of a mirror: I have nothing to reflect myself back, yet the other day looking at the western section of the Richmond District reflected in my mom’s cabinet glass door, I recognized Anders’s up-high Instagram panoramas. The same view from his apartment a block away. Only through a backward reflection did I recognize my own San Francisco neighborhood.
It’s 2:15 AM back home in California and everyone I’d want to talk to is asleep. Jet lag is catching up and I’m fighting my drowsiness by snacking and blinking and warming myself by the sun’s rays through the window. Early winter, Northern Indian. Light made golden through pollution and smoke falls lazily on the stone floor. The sun seems to be going down in the same direction it came up and I’m listening to the new Black Marble album which is like translating Amsterdam in fall of 2012 into the present moment in New Delhi because I listened to their first album over and over that fall in the lofted front room of Willem’s government-subsidized flat in Amsterdam’s Eastern Docklands. Another depressing time without lack of self-inflicted violence as a litmus test of stock: my constitution wasn’t strong enough and I returned. Yes the coroner confirmed those bones on the cliff were Jeremiah’s and I went back for the memorial service, which occurred to me as a cogent excuse to leave at the time, but it wasn’t inherently true. The truth only came when my surprise footsteps up the stairs of our apartment in San Francisco caused my mother such joy she cried. The best part of travel is coming home.
[1] https://twitter.com/bibliobebe/status/1204295827876990976
[2] My purpose in life seems to be carrying the cosmic weight of my parents’ wellbeing, because I am both an only child and an adult child of an alcoholic whose nobility is communicated through the female virtue of care giving, which I use here as a euphemism for codependence.
[3] Jeremiah, my high school lover who apparently died on a cliff in Big Tujunga Canyon sometime between 2010 and 2012, was part of our Belgian exchange program, class of 2001 group. He told me the only reason he went on the trip was to get away from his family for as long as possible. He listened to the same cassette tape of the Steve Miller Band on a Walkman every bus ride, and by some bad miracle was placed with a Belgian girl whose boyfriend supplied joints everyday.
[4] The most extreme example being flying to Argentina from New York City to hitch a ride across the Atlantic on an Italian cargo ship.
[5] Drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, doing drugs: all of it manipulates the body’s natural functions to deliver some feeling not easily attained otherwise (if at all). Yoga’s purpose is to be comfortable enough in the body to transcend the limitations physicality places on spiritual pursuits. Aging gracefully is reconciling the rivalry between mind and body.
[6] Not sleeping all night laying on Charlotte and Lizzie’s tiny studio floor in Shoreditch; hustling through rush hour in London on the tube to Gatwick; switching airplane seats with a British woman taking her tween daughter on vacation to the Canary Islands; the sweet paranoia and simultaneous dulling and heightening of senses when the edible comes on in the shower of the hotel room; eating a whole dark chocolate bar for dinner on my 35th birthday.