While I’m still gathering experience in the sphere of actually going away, I am considered a master in wanting-to-go. Fourteen years in suburban New Jersey allowed me the time to cultivate such skills as map collecting, airplane doodling, and fantasy packing, which is when you imagine fitting your life into one piece of carry-on luggage and walking out of this town for good. You know that game, right? I sat in Geometry class, inked in the margins of my notebook, and made strict rules for my suitcase. No more than two pairs of shoes. One lightweight jacket. One ready camera.
Recently, a friend wrote me an email that included the line “I do really want to be on my own for a bit in a new place.” “I feel like I need more independence and to get away from the crazy awesome but intense and co-dependent support network I have here so that I can figure out what I am doing with my life,” she said. I responded immediately and in all caps, like this: “AHHHHHH.” Only more and more H’s could express how fully I agree with her. The thing is, I’m away right now. I’m away yet I still want to go.
Like I said, I don’t have much experience in this. After high school, I enrolled in a college 20 miles away from my hometown. After college, I moved five neighborhoods south of campus. Every few weekends I took a bus back to my parents’ house to eat roast chicken and then lie in a post-dinner haze in front of their fireplace. In a short lifetime, I’ve managed to find some of the most incredible friends in the world, who forgave me years of suburban rage, indulged my cravings for Ethiopian food, and organized slumber parties around the movie Jumanji. Life was perfect and whole.
Still, I checked airfarewatchdog.com on my lunch breaks.
Still, I flung myself against my boyfriend’s futon and whined, “I’ve never been anywhere. Not anywhere!” as he patted my back.
Still, after a while, I left.
I only moved six months ago, so time isn’t on my side — but if we’re awarding points for distance, then listen up: I’m in Kamchatka. Oh, you didn’t watch that PBS nature documentary? Or you don’t know this place from the board game Risk, because you don’t play Risk, because you’re not my dad? Kamchatka is a volcanic peninsula on the far eastern edge of Russia. It holds titles like “highest recorded density of brown bears on Earth,” “only geyser field in Eurasia,” and “longest occupier of the top spot on my places-to-go list.” It’s a fantasy suspended on the end of the world.
At the end of August, I finally packed my suitcase, extorted promises from the boy I love to wait for my eventual return, and flew 20 hours away from home to this distant, hissing, beautiful land. Here, I rent a brown and yellow two-bedroom apartment that comes complete with a cat. And aren’t I happy? Didn’t I dream of this? A master of wanting, didn’t I fantasize about this exact existence for three years before my plane took off for Russia? (Yes, yes, yes.) Why, then, do I sit in my bedroom in Kamchatka, watch movies about Kamchatka on my computer, and long to travel to the place I already am? Why do I ride the public bus here and start shaking with the sudden awful desire to flee?
Wanting to go is a hard habit to break.
by Julia Philips, The Hairpin | Read more:
