The poetry of travel
When does a person’s story really begin?
It’s hard to say, really.
Some could argue it’s the day you are born.
But I felt like mine began here.
Dún Laoghaire, Ireland.
As I sat watching sailboats in the distance off the coast of Ireland in the seaside town Dún Laoghaire, I realized I was getting somewhere. Not just physically, but mentally, too. I was moving closer in the direction of my dreams. Moving closer to some kind of truth. I had just finished my sophomore year of college and suddenly had found myself 3,615 miles away from home. For a brief moment, all sides of me aligned. I sighed a deep breath.
I realized everything would be okay. I realized traveling would be what saved me.
As we move through the motions of daily life, we often overlook the progress we’ve made. But in that moment, and in most of my moments on the road since, I have found peace. A genuine peace so certain it feels everlasting.
Traveling is both magic and fate, full of chance encounters and serendipitous meetings.
Traveling allows us to live out the stories in our heads and live into the people we believe we are.
Traveling is when writers meet the real versions of the beloved fictitious characters us readers attach ourselves to in novels.
In the unknown places, landscapes are illuminated. We see glimpses of a fairy tale dance before us.
Traveling expands our minds and allows us to see with our own eyes the beautiful manifestations of human creation. It allows us to clearly see the desires of our own; a mirror for our truths.
Perhaps it was cupping my hands and sipping the unfiltered water from a creek in the Wicklow mountains where Oscar Wilde used to write where some sort of magic infused into me. Perhaps I’m so deeply embedded in my own fantasies that I’ve created a world of my own, one so personal, one so far removed from this physical realm that it can only be accessed when passing through one place to the next. A secret, invisible pocket hidden in the fibers of the universe that we share, just Creator and I.
Traveling is the closest thing we have to time travel, and it’s only during those moments on the road where I’m able to finally catch up and access the real me. I’m lost somewhere, my spirit lingering in the both the dusty Grand Canyon to the streets of New Orleans and everywhere in between. I linger in whispers under the stars in the San Juan mountains and in a rooftop kiss in Alaska on New Years Eve, with the slightest glitch of the Northern Lights peeking on through.
My soul is stuck in-transit, on a journey of it’s own.
It’s only during that moment when I sink into my seat, press my forehead to the window and surrender during the airplane takeoff that I can confidently say, “hey nicole. there you are. good to see you again.”
After all, I’m not much of anything but my memories and my travels. Sometimes I feel that I’m a ghost; a mere conduit for moments to pass through, for love to whisper to. Forever just passing through.
