Maps

I am rarely honest or blunt. I'm so accustomed to hiding in vague metaphors that sometimes I feel like I lose what I mean to say. Sometimes I am so fascinated by what other people are doing that I forget what I do myself. Lately I am fascinated by this woman & her daughter who quit their lives in Baltimore, sold their furniture, drove to California, and have been living in hostels. I've stayed up until 4am reading their blogs. It's nothing too unique I guess but it fascinates me and lately it's made me feel like traveling is the absolute most important thing I could be doing. Sometimes I think that the experiences I've had in other places are ten times more valuable than anything else I've done. But then I sit in Colorado in a baby blue Camry smoking a cigarette out the window on I-25 feeling like it is the most exquisite experience of my entire life. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever relate to anyone the way I relate to her or experience anything more worthwhile than the conversations I've had on porches or sucking on clamshells in her kitchen.

I have been to sixty-one Jack's Mannequin shows and 37 states. Sometimes I wish I've blogged about it, every detail and every moment in photograph and framed, every conversation documented, every interstate tracked. I sit in class and go through these dissociative spells where my entire life seems written out and ridiculous. Sometimes I see no value in doing anything else, these hours in these desks cracking my back. Like that weekend when we were driving back from Louisiana, the sun was setting over the Mississippi and I felt like all the plans I had were fencing me into a narrative. I remember the feeling that their 6 square foot slab of concrete was the only place I'd ever want to be again, that somehow the french toast and the cigarettes we shared in April meant more to me than any semblance of "life" I had elsewhere. But then I wonder if I ever found something worth settling for, or if this is all a desperate case of wanderlust. Lust, indefinitely, is the driving force of my life so far. Lust and spontaneity. I don't know if I'll ever know what it's worth but it's been an amazing thing so far. Sometimes I wonder if I'm faking something, when I think about how much it meant to us to swim at Ventura Beach, filling bottles with sand and experiencing everything for the first time, dipping our toes into the pacific and eating clam chowder out of bread bowls in chinatown, worried that somehow the newness will fade. But maybe we were just children, maybe the first time is always the best time, maybe the pictures and the alcohol are just more mediums of the experience.

Sometimes I worry myself sick that I spend so much time elsewhere that I am losing something at home. I'm worried that the time I spend away takes away from the time I spend with the people who stay. I fight constantly with myself over which I'd rather focus on. The trips end and I grow tired of watching people leave. I am always leaving and always watching people leave, their planes lift and their cars turn corners, upwind from jet engines and staring into red lights. Why can't we be the kind of people who stay? Sometimes I wonder whether staying somewhere requires a stronger spine, whether seeing the same people every day is such an inconvenience. But then I think about the nights I spent in Colorado watching the walls cave in on me, and the time I spent in a town that pushed up against the mountains until it all almost toppled on top of itself, and how claustrophobic it became, and how good it feels to scream off of rocks in Kansas, and sit on levees and hills. And I can't help but fascinate myself with this girl writing in the common room of a hostel, talking about the morning stroll she took through Montreal. Maybe wanderlust isn't such a bad thing. Maybe we're not all so fit for the narrative prescribed to us. I know that at the very least I have incredible stories to tell, and I'm tired of apologizing for them.