I wonder if I’ve fucked up in some profound, irreversible way. It is possible that I’ve fucked up in many profound, irreversible ways. When I wake at 3 a.m., pulse pin-balling, my brain likes to sift through every choice I’ve ever made—declining Dustin Hoffman’s invitation to a barbecue, failing to develop a single skill apart from writing, asking, “When are you due?” of my brother’s friend who was no longer pregnant. You get to a point, around 40 maybe, where you can see the whole of your life thus far as a Tetris Matrix of decisions and indecisions. It would be nice to start over and make a few tweaks.
In waking hours, the panic dissipates. I tell myself that everyone questions their path (do they?), that although the life I’ve made isn’t perfect, I’ve worked hard for it, and some days I’m in love with it.
*
I get uncomfortable when people tell me, You have my dream job. Or they tell me (wistfully, I think), I guess you can do that while you’re single, as if I’m 20 years old on a Study Abroad semester. These comments trigger a mess of emotions—guilt because I don’t always find travel writing dreamy, fear that it will somehow be taken away, embarrassment at being the object of envy, even if the envy isn’t well thought-out.
The truth is, most people would hate travel writing. After two or three back-to-back trips, they would be sick of hotels. Sick of removing their shoes for Security, sick of the indignity of the middle seat. Sick of spending life alone. Sick of realizing for the 23049873058360984720936th time that they packed all wrong and forgot their bras. They would crave routine and their dog and a decent, consistent paycheck.
I get it.
But a couple weeks ago, I went to Argentina to write about a chef and remembered, viscerally, why I live like this—with uncertainty, and instability, and jet lag that once (in Israel, when I was writing about hummus) acted as a hellish stimulant and kept me awake for a week.
In Mendoza, where the Andes Mountains lie smooth and soft as though sleeping under a giant blanket, I briefly recalled my back-home problems and experienced them as distant, surreal. They registered as long ago pains, the kind we can hardly feel anymore.
Someone once told me that I work as a travel writer because I’m “running away.” He intended to insult me (or explain my career to me?), but I wasn’t insulted. I’m a staunch running-away advocate. Running away is the ultimate high—an opportunity to gain perspective, a break from ruminating, from self-doubt, from entrapment; a reminder of the infinite ways to live. It’s a chance to meet strangers. And I love strangers.
Argentina has some of my favorite strangers. The locals are so friendly has to be the cringiest of all travel-writing clichés, but in Argentina, the people will instantly kiss you. They will invite you to their Sunday parillas. They will pass you their yerba mate with its communal metal straw. They will chop off the top of a two-liter Coke bottle, add Fernet to the Coke, and pass that around, too.
At times, I pathologize my love of strangers—does it mean I like only the idea of people? People I know deeply might hurt me. Or suffocate me. I might have to feel their pain. They might be really goddamn annoying. I might be expected to ride the waves of their moods. They might die. It’s easier to stand to the side of intimacy. Strangers are nice and clean. Strangers come packaged with possibility and freedom and the option to drift away.
When I was teaching my grad students in Barcelona last summer, I gave a craft lecture about strangers, positing that the richest writing has a mysterious character at its center. In literature, as in life, a place, too, can function as a stranger. On the flight home from Buenos Aires, I read the Argentine writer Pedro Mairal’s novel The Woman from Uruguay, in which the most intriguing character is not “the woman,” but Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo: “…the strange tower of the Palacio Salvo, the horizon of the river in the background. I was living my life.”
That’s what strangeness does for me, too—makes me feel that I’m living my life.
Love,
Diana
P.S. What do you love about travel? Tell me in the comments.
P.P.S. A prompt: Write about your 3 a.m.
My 3 am? I’ll never get my book written and I’ll never own my own place and did I marry the right man and why don’t I have a career and why didn’t I take all those designer bags and shit that we’re offered to me when I was hostessing way back I could sell it all on the Real Real and make some cash and not feel so flippin unaccomplished all the time!
How’s that for 3am anxiety lol
Beautiful piece!
I have often wondered if my giddy love for strangers would dissipate along with their dissipating strangeness if I stayed too long ..
I suppose the only upside of travel being expensive is that I never have to find out..!