My instinct is telling me to stop. ‘Stop writing, because the words might betray you.’ I haven’t decided whether I’m to listen.
There are very few moments in which we let ourselves be unguarded. It happens to me most when I’m in a new country, where the language and limitations are unknown. Perhaps it’s liberating, this lack of knowledge. If you don’t know what to navigate, how could you possibly feel lost?
I let myself wander, and don’t worry about where I’ll eat lunch. The closer I look at a map, the more suffocated I get.
I blame Daddy for this, for setting an example of discovery unlike any other. He pushed boundaries in new countries—ours and his own—and left us there to see what we’d find.
He took my mother, who is afraid of domestic pets, to a jungle in Zambia and parked an open-air unarmed jeep right under a tree on top of which a leopard was hunting. Her whole body went still. I huddled close to her, watched her face give way to fate, and read the real definition of trust.
She was no different though, in her own way. When I was five she threw me into a swimming pool in Thailand (confident I knew how to keep myself afloat). That’s how I learned to swim for the first time.
It’s often the walls we build as parents that prevent our children from breaking through their own. Would we do better once in a while to allow ourselves a little more liberty?
On the walk up to Bob Marley’s birthplace, Daddy noticed a hand sticking out of a hole in the wall, selling what to me looked like hand-rolled cigarettes. He pointed to it, implying the absurdity of not being able to see the man’s face, body, or any other limb. “There’s a hopeful handful of joints,” he said chuckling to himself. “Maybe we should take one.”
On a more serious note (but perhaps no less absurd), Daddy trekked up the Himalayas despite having suffered a heart attack, with his best friend (14 years younger). When he came back half his size in weight, and double in joy, I saw what freedom looked like.
Of course, travel comes at a price (monetary or otherwise). But Daddy always put it at the top of his list. When my parents first moved to London, struggling to make ends meet without a saving in sight, they travelled around Europe for a month on exactly a hundred pounds. They slept in the car and took showers at petrol stations (cheating by using the same coin and jumping in and out before the water could stop)! It was always their favorite story to tell.
They stand as reminders, these stories, when the monotony of our everyday routines starts to itch, that we have the ability to surprise ourselves. What we’re really looking to be are tourists in our own lives.
I like not asking for directions, being grammatically incorrect when ordering from the menu, and taking twenty pictures of the same sunset. I would never do this in my own city.
I was once punched by a stranger on the street in Moscow. I reacted the same way to her that I did to a bartender who proposed to me in a random Spanish club. Blankly, unaffectedly, and far too lightly than the situation demanded.
But I like not caring sometimes. And I wish I could take more of that surrender back home with me.
I’m a little relieved I’m writing this while I’m away, on an island shaped like a croissant, formed by a volcanic eruption. Perhaps I mightn’t have said it like this, had I not been sitting on something that resulted from such a massive force of nature.
It’s necessary to let slip a little control. Over our children or our doubts about what they might do (be it drown in a swimming pool or smoke pot). Over our fears, whether they’re of pet cats and dogs, or testing the limits of our heart.
And hardest of all, over the things we never thought we’d be able to accept: that a parent is no longer around to climb a mountain with; or that a stranger is, and wants to go all the way to outer space.
Of all my possessions, the ones I most control are my words. I knew they would betray me in the end.
