What a heavy thing to leave behind the people you love. In the past few years in Portland, I have found myself surrounded by an incredible menagerie of people that I love deeply, and I know I'll always miss them. How strange to say good-bye to your friends that you can't imagine living without, your past loves that you spent years pining after, your career that you painstakingly built with responsibility and consistency, even with the knowledge that there is something out beyond the familiar borders that you must pursue. How strange to sell most of your belongings, send the rest to your mother, and leave the remnants in a dear friends basement, knowing you won't see them for a long, long time. Even still, the heartache of leaving cannot quell my desire to move on.
I walked all over Frankfurt today thinking about these things. I walked from the West end of Frankfurt to the East end, through cobblestone alleyways and along the Rhine. I walked through the zoo, which was strangely comforting because it housed the familiar animals of zoos all over the world. I walked when I could have taken the train so that I could observe more closely the street corners and the graffiti, so that I could more completely absorb this foreign city and simultaneously be alone in my own mind. I walked and walked for hours. I walked until I wore through one of the soles of my boots. I was reminded of what it felt like to be free and on the road without a destination. I shed an old skin, the skin of belongings and debt and occupation, and I grew traveler skin, the dermis of freedom, an open heart and a flexible mind. I want to know myself again without past influences, and I want to embrace my new self among foreign backdrops. I struggle with Emerson when he says, "Traveling is a fool's paradise... I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” I don't identify with traveling as fleeing from self, rather it is exploration of self. I don't feel at all that I've made a great escape. I feel that I've gently boarded up the winter home, covered the furniture in blankets, made everything ready to return to in a different season. It's true we carry ourselves with us wherever we go, and I will still be myself, but I will also let go of some of the past and make space for new things. Tomorrow, Italy.
