What happens to Away?

 

 

After the connecting flights and unpacked bags. After first days back and remembering routine. We sum up months of our lives in five minute conversations over coffee and liquor while the road takes its place in our veins. Time runs and we stay, waiting for the glimmer. My mind wanders and the battle of remembering to be “Here” can, at times, consume. There is a great vulnerability in explaining friendships and tiny loves found on the other side of the world. These connections, so easily dismissed by those with planted roots, pull at us like the

moon. 

 

After taking to the road you see how absolutely whole laying on a beach after midnight with near strangers can make you feel. You discover the simple freedom in driving down a foreign highway with the wind beating against worn through clothes with no particular desire but to continue on. There is an unspoken understanding that travelers share. Wanting everything the world has to give and keeping the fragile balance between utter connectedness and lonely that sends us so far from the places we’ve known. Everyone has their reason: curiosity, heartbreak, desire. Each taking its place in building the way we

leave.

 

From packing a bag and heading south alone with a mattress in the backseat of my beat up truck to seeing children who look like matchsticks beg as mothers lay defeated at the edge of sidewalks. Even as my knuckles turn white while the airplane flirts with the dip and pull of eastern wind the world has taught me that my heart will break as many times as it has shown me hope, that scars are much more exciting as “Adventure Spots”, and the good people do exist. Intentions can be true and treating people as an end rather than a means is always a battle worth fighting. Even with the least amount of money I have ever had to my name in my adult life, leaving has given me enough to know that whether here or there, I will never be

grounded.

 

I read an article once that said above all the super powers, the gift people yearned for was flight.

 

Be your own wings. 

Be the wind. 

 

Set your struggle to the sails and build waves where the quiet used to 

Live