Traveling Light

I bought myself a plane ticket to Spain for my birthday. I leave tomorrow. I intend to spend the dawn of my 28th year on earth in misty mountain solitude, listening to medieval chants and wandering around the oldest still-functioning monastery in Europe.

After that, I'm going to Barcelona to party.

I am refusing to take a suitcase on this trip (not such a strange thing, for me) but I am also resistant to even taking a backpacking pack. It's too big. I'm packing a duffel bag for this trip, the kind of bag one takes on a long weekend. A "weekender," the fashion people would call it. It's fake red leather, and my mother spotted it on the free table at Value Village Thrift Store two months ago and brought it home for me. It has no rips and no holes and the strap is still attached and the stitches are firm and the zipper works, so I'm not sure why it was on the free table, but it has a good home, now. This is a bag I will love.

I have my little duffel loaded up with clothes: underwear, cardigans, a cocktail dress. A toiletry bag. A current converter. I'll add a pair of fancy flats later tonight.

I have a backpack, too, a carry on, the backpack that has been on every single trip I've taken since I was fourteen and went to Oceania for three weeks. This backpack has been around the world. It's been to Australia and New Zealand, it's been to Spain before, it was with me when I got stranded in Morocco, it's been to Paris and seen the Mona Lisa, and it's held water and sandwiches while I hiked in the Schwarzwald. It's met my daughter's father. It's climbed Mayan ruins on the Yucatan, seen waterfalls in the Andes, gone to street parties outside of Santo Domingo. This backpack has been to New York City more times than I can count, seen the redwoods of Big Basin State Park in California, wandered around downtown Detroit. It's been to St. Louis and Indianapolis.

Into this backpack I will put my camera bag, laden with camera and lenses and lens filters and cleaning cloths and memory cards and a battery charger and a card reader. I will put my tiny pink computer, and its charger. I'll put my phone and its charger. I'll put in two books and a wallet and a passport and three packs of American Spirit cigarettes, in the yellow box, and a lighter. The lighter will also be yellow.

I've had butterflies in my stomach for days now, anticipating this trip. My insides are quivering in anticipation of being unattached for seven entire, glorious days. My wanderlust is ferocious, voracious, and stems primarily from a desire to have no attachments at all. My daydreams are always about taking off into the sunset and leaving everything behind. My fondest, most impossible wish is to start over, completely, from scratch. I want to disappear with my duffel and my backpack and never come back, never look back, reinvent everything about myself.

I can't do that. Having babies really puts a damper on your ability to disappear without a trace. Well, unless you're my baby's father.

(Heh.)

So, I take the next best thing: Whenever I can, I go somehwere alone. Like tomorrow.

I have many vices. Cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, pretty dresses, vintage hats, ridiculous high-heeled shoes, loud music, driving too fast. Some of these are probably even full-blown addictions. But of all my vices, and all my addictions, this is most certainly the worst. This is the one that could cause me to abandon everything, hit rock bottom, sever every tie. It would be so easy since the addiction is to rootlessness, restlessness, the ability to move on whenever the urge hits, to put one's life in two small bags and go, onward, forward, sideways, backwards, it doesn't matter as long as you're moving.

The addiction, you see, is to this fluttery feeling I get before stepping off into the unknown. I am addicted to the rush of adrenaline and the limitless vistas of possibility. This feeling is better than any drug, than any drink, than any touch. This feeling is better than any love. This combination of knowing everything theoretically and nothing concretely and being able to see everything and nothing all at once is better than anything else you can name. I would chase this feeling endlessly if I could. I would step off every cliff, climb every mountain, turn down every blind alley to find it again.

If I could. If only I could.

Wanderlust.

I have persistent, pernicious, well-documented and terribly inconvenient wanderlust. It started when I was 12. I begged and begged my parents to take me somewhere, or (better yet) send me somewhere.

My mother understood. I get this from her, after all. We think it's genetic.

They sent me to Australia and New Zealand. Since that trip in the summer of 2008, I have proceeded to visit Spain, Morocco, the Bahamas, Paris, Germany, Luxembourg, London, Mexico and Colombia.

In the last 9 months alone I've been to Mexico and Colombia, after having not left the country since my daughter's conception in the fall of 2007. I have laughingly nicknamed 2010 "The Year of the Return of the World Traveller."

I want to run away. Right now.

I want to buy a plane ticket, any plane ticket, the cheapest plane ticket I can find, and hop aboard and not look back. At least not for awhile. At least not until the wandering beast inside that seems to be insatiable is temporarily tamed.

I want to climb Kilimanjaroo and see Baku. I want to wander Copenhagen and Amsterdam, learn to dance cumbia on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, visit the jungles of Ecuador. I want to see Johannesburg and return to Tangiers. I want to sit on the sea steps of Barcelona and go dancing in Munich. I want to ride a scooter through the streets of Taipei and walk along the Great Wall.

And I want to do it all right now. The effort involved in keeping myself seated in this desk chair is superhuman. I squirm, I dance, I do anything and everything that makes me look ridiculous because if I don't, I will get up and run away. RUN. AWAY.

I want to see the world. I want to drink it in and love every dirty, shining, beautiful piece of it.

And right now, I want to do it right now. Who's in?