Since leaving for college it seems I have been prisoner to explaining my need to go. 17 years old and leaving to another town, another state, hours away had never felt so right. I wasn’t leaving them I would explain over and over, but simply leaving. Moving on to a new place, new faces… not a new me, but a different me.
Over the last 10 years I have moved from my small home town to another state and eventually another country, always farther from “home” but closer to finding me. It has never been about running or hiding or leaving a bad thing. I am a traveler at heart, a shaker in my soul. I need to move, I need to feel the change of a new pathway under my feet and the smell the scent of a new garden in the air. I need to hear the sounds of a new town waking up in the morning and see the lights of a new city finally dim at night. The adrenaline of feeling outside of my comfort zone is euphoric. I need to keep going.
Mountain Views in Guatemala.
Anyone who travels know this. Gets this. Feels this. Needs this.
Yet every time, without fail, I am accused of abandoning someone. Questioned, yelled at, cried to, asked to stay. But I never can.
To my friends that want me to stay still, I simply say… move. Get in your car first and drive somewhere, anywhere, different. Feel the wind on your face and the sun on your arm hanging out the window on your drive to no man’s land. Jump on a plane or a train or a bus, who cares… just let it take you somewhere different. Unknown. Unfamiliar. Possibly unplanned.
The moments I have impulsively buckled in for a road trip or jumped on a bus to a random town in Spain have been the most freeing moments of my life. Navigating through Central America with only a paper map, Abasi and a bottle of tequila for courage has been one of my most rewarding experiences.
Navigating… and lost… in Mexico.
In every new body of water I stand reflected in, every new language I immerse myself in or every unknown alley I take, I turn towards a better understanding of myself. A intimacy hard to explain unless you have stood at a literal crossroads and simply pointed in the direction you wanted to go, unaware of the outcome.
Tarifa, Spain
Even now… in paradise… I feel myself itching anxiously to move. To see, to experience, to feel vulnerable again.
To my friends that want me to stay still, know this: I carry our stories on my journeys and weave your spirits into my experiences. I do not leave you behind, but carry you beside me into every new cafe or bookstore I venture. I roam because you have strengthened me enough to feel as if I can venture out and always have a home to return to.
And once you go, explore and return, overflowing with new ideas and tales of adventures you will get it. Feel it. You will come back with friends’ names you can barely pronounce whom with you’ve had conversations barely understandable between the barriers of language, yet you will feel FULL. Alive. You will feel humbled. Rich. But most of all you will finally get that every movement I ever took didn’t take me away from you, simply closer to you in another direction.
Just go. And then you won’t have to ask me why I can’t stay.
Tarifa, Spain.
Do You Have a Jungle Princess? 