Five years ago I would have said (and did say) that I would like to drop out of the unrelenting escalator march of scholarly/professional progress (be born, get educated, get more educated, get a job that may or may not have something to do with what you got educated in, have kids, get rich, get richer, still be unsatisfied, get old, get bored) and just get on a plane, go abroad, travel around, and forget about striving.
I don't know if I ever posted this here. I think I did on my old diary. But just in case, here is something I wrote in my private journal sophomore year of college, September 2003:
Don’t ever let me forget that we had this conversation.
‘I just... the hardest part about leaving would be doing it alone,’ he says.
There is silence in the back of the bus because I’m deciding whether to say it and mean it, mean it through and through.
‘Nick, if you were to actually do it,’ I say, slowly, deliberately, ‘I would go with you.’
His face is suddenly lit. ‘Would you?’
‘I...’
‘Would you really?’
My eyes are tearing up.
‘Let’s do it, then,’ he whispers.
We spend the whole rest of the day in a planning daze, a fear-purging daze... overall, it’s a harsh daze. The first few minutes are the hardest. We want to say everything at once. Our parents, and what they would think. (His dad would be angry. My dad would be disappointed, but not angry. My mother would be furious just because she never had the guts to do it herself.) We can’t leave our roommates in the lurch. We can’t waste the money already spent on tuition for the semester. We can’t...
So it’s decided; the beginning of next year. The Bound stops at Valmont. ‘Next year we’re going to have forgotten we had this conversation,’ I say to him as we stand up.
‘Yeah,’ he says, and then shakes his head. ‘No, we can’t forget.’
‘We can’t forget,’ I say, putting my hand on his shoulder.
‘We won’t,’ he says.
‘See, it’s going to be so much easier for you,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Because you’ve got the first step done already.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Getting rid of all your stuff.’
‘Oh.’
Silence.
‘But then the next step, what’s that?’ he asks.
‘The next step is being able to let everyone you love go.’
‘The South American jungle,’ he exclaims, walking past a field of weeds in North Boulder.
‘Not the jungle,’ I say.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s the jungle. We can’t survive in the jungle. We’ll die.’
‘So?’
‘When you put it that way...’
‘I’d rather die in the jungle than die in this fucking place.’
I look sideways at him. He never swears. ‘Plus,’ I say, sweeping past this, ‘I don’t want to live somewhere where there aren’t any other people.’
‘Me,’ he says.
‘Other than you.’
‘No offense,’ I rush on, seeing his face, ‘but I cannot spend that much time with anyone for that
long a period of time without killing them.’
He laughs.
‘I can’t,’ I say, shrugging.
‘I can,’ he says.
‘A boat,’ he exclaims, turning the corner from Valmont to Edgewater. ‘We’ll live on a boat in the ocean. No property taxes on the surface of the water!’
‘Oh no no no no. I can’t stand water. No water. No.’
‘What?’
‘You know that. I can’t swim. I get seasick. I hate water. No.’
‘You don’t have to swim. Plus, we’ll get all our food needs met.’
‘No we fucking won’t, we’ll...’
‘Oh yeah, I guess we can’t eat any fruit. I guess we’d probably get scurvy.’
‘I don’t want to get scurvy.’
‘You don’t want to get scurvy?’ He laughs, looks askance at me.
‘No, I don’t want to get scurvy.’
‘Thailand,’ he says, walking past a Thai restaurant.
‘Something my dad once told me,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘We were in London, on the subway, passing all these bums begging and no one was giving them anything... they were really in a bad way. He said, ‘You can knock Communism all you want, but they feed their people, and they medicate their people. In Beijing I saw no one begging on the streets, no one.’’
‘No beggars?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘China, then,’ he says.
‘The hardest thing would be leaving Patrick,’ he says.
‘Financially or personally?’ I ask.
‘I... financially,’ he says.
‘The thing is, I’m so scared,’ he mumbles, too quietly almost.
‘What? What of?’
‘I’m scared I won’t make it. I’m scared I won’t know how to survive.’
‘If you couldn’t survive you’d come back.’
‘...........’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
‘Well, you don’t have to worry about that yet.’
‘I don’t know if I’d come back,’ he says again.
We’re sitting in the fast food Japanese restaurant when the ridiculousness hits me. ‘Nick, in a year you won’t even be the same person,’ I say. ‘You know what I mean? Do you know how often you change your mind? Every two days, it’s...’
‘I know,’ he says, unexpectedly.
‘You do?’
‘Yeah. I mean, yeah. I guess.... I guess I have to find myself in a situation which is open to change.’
‘Maybe..’
‘School isn’t that situation.’
‘No.’
He spoons chopstickfuls and chopstickfuls of rice and eel into his mouth before he continues. ‘If fear of leaving school does get the best of me, at least... I’ll always know there’s something small in the back of my head telling me that school just isn’t right.’
That’s not enough, I say in my head as we leave the restaurant. Because I was telling him earlier that every plan made by Camille and I in high school, every road trip, every hitchhiking jaunt to Canada, every backpacking trip around Europe, has fallen through every summer because Camille’s parents ‘won’t let her’.
‘Fuck that,’ he says, ‘just don’t tell them! Just leave! Write from an internet cafe and just say... ‘Mom, I’m in Europe.’
‘I know. I know. All I’m saying is... every summer the plans fell through because of her and her parents. Every summer I was totally ready.’
‘I...’
‘What I’m saying is this: if this falls through, it will not be because of me.’
‘It won’t?’
‘No.’
‘So what you’re saying is it’ll be because of me.’
‘Yes.’
He crunches a few leaves in his path. ‘Sweet,’ he says, after a length.
This was three years pre-Indonesia. Nick and I hadn't yet started dating. I loved him, though. It was already getting impossible to hide it. And this conversation stuck, gluelike and word for word, to my brain, long enough for me to practically transcribe it, because merely the thought of leaving the country with him and surviving on coconuts was enough to make my mind and body light up. Logic and reason were completely suppressed, my disdain for something even as wimpy as car-camping was totally wiped out, and for awhile all I dreamed about was dropping out of society with him.
And in a way, we ended up eventually doing so. We weren't as crafty and revolutionary as we'd hoped; we both got degrees first. We got jobs at retail establishments. And when we did leave the country, we made sure we had jobs lined up and housing set. By then, the novelty of his thrill-seeking personality had worn thin on me and I had returned to being the drab realist that I am naturally.
But even stepping out of the mold of career-striving was a huge step sideways, and not easy for me to do. I am happy I did it. I think. If only because now, when I get an errant thought about how I'd like to drop out of society and move abroad, I actually have a living breathing picture in my head about what that's like. I don't have an idyllic (and totally false) image of waking up every morning to swaying palms and a clear head with no worries in the world, and Nick bringing me a coconut he just climbed a palm to pick, to eat for breakfast before we began our carefree day of frolicking in the ocean.
Here is a longer diary entry from December 2007, from Indonesia.
We start out sitting half-buried in bright green beach vines. Or at least that's where it feels like we start out. Start out, finish, everything else. World without end, bright green beach vines and a measured, heavy silence.
If time had started here we would have wandered off in two separate directions and gone on to lead two entirely separate lives, and we wouldn't have thought twice about it. We, or I, at least, wouldn't have wondered what his hands would look like once I'd turned my back on them, whether they'd be clutching each other in his lap or lazily tracing sand-roads around the cities of wild dogprints. I wouldn't have wondered whether he was staring after me or already in the water, trying to surf on an old piece of driftwood. We would have just gone as if neither of us were more to the other than strangers passing on the street, heads down and feet flying, in a big city like New York or Chicago.
Time didn't start here, though. Time, this time, started somewhere further away and entirely different. And because it did, I do wonder these things, or I would if I tried to run away, so instead of moving, I stay buried.
The vines are soft and slippery in my fingers, the sun is hot, and I want to be buried in sand. "Do you want to bury each other?" I ask him.
"What do you mean, bury each other?"
"I mean bury each other. In the sand. Under that palm?"
"Well, definitely not under that palm, a coconut might fall."
"That palm's not bearing coconut. You see any coconuts up there?"
"No, but that doesn't mean there aren't any."
"Okay. Fine. Let's bury each other under some other tree. Something that's not a palm. How about over there?"
"No. Forget it."
"If you didn't want to, why didn't you just say so?"
"I think I just did."
Sometimes when he says things like this I wish his eyes were tired, that he had spent the morning throwing up, or corralling seventeen screaming children, or climbing mountains; anything to make it seem like it's not personal, that he's just exhausted, can't move to do anything strenuous. That otherwise, he would be thrilled to bury me in sand. Teach me to bodysurf. Paint designs on our bodies, orange, with spit-damp ochre.
But his eyes aren't tired; they're bright and lively and looking somewhere else. Without saying a word, he stands up and walks away.
"Where are you going?" I ask the air around me, and the humidity swallows my words down with a gurgle, spits them back at me as a thin sheen of sweat. Drops of it form on my fingertips and I look at them, my words, and then look up and see that he's already dragging a piece of driftwood into the waves.
The real pain of it is in the fact that this is the kind of landscape that makes you want to be with the love of your life, and if you happen not to be, to want to turn whoever you're with into the love of your life, even if it would never work out, or, as the case may be, if it has already worked out and then fallen badly apart. The beach is ridged and pockmarked with birds' claws and dogs' paws, with the occasional spreading surface of clam or conch shells, and the scuttle and bubble of hermit crabs surfacing and submerging with the waves. The sand is black and silver and white and completely smooth, blending into a bay on one side and a mountain on the other. Over the mountain, which is flat-topped and appears covered in thick green cotton, a thundercloud has been looming for hours, motionless and far enough away as to be effectively harmless, but still gorgeous. The sun is directly overhead and filtering through the palms, which every few minutes drop a coconut – plop! crack! – into the sand or onto a log or – splash! – into the creek. The plops and cracks and splashes, the crash of the waves, the crowing of the roosters, the shouts of the villagers calling their dogs off of someone's pigs, and the ever-present wind hissing and whistling over the ocean – this is the island's wind ensemble, its quintet.
It is best heard, I think, doing something quirky. Burying someone up to the neck in black smooth sand, then sculpting an entirely new body for them out of the surrounding sand, perhaps with shell necklaces, squiggly arms, rolls of grainy hip fat, or large froglike toes. Spending hours sitting motionless in a dry sea of hermit crabs, waiting for one to venture far enough from its hole to be captured in an impossibly swift arm scoop. Realizing that no matter how far a hermit crab travels from its hole, it can still return faster than a human arm can move. Floating in the shallow ebb of the shore and relinquishing all control, letting the ocean do with you what it pleases, whether what it pleases is a rough slam into the sand bar or a languid, dizzy turn miles down the beach to the reef.
There is time for this. The background is perfect for it, and while some people may fantasize about drinking pina coladas while laying in hammocks reading the most terrible romance novel they can get their hands on, what I'm wishing for is to be able to act like the most curious of children with my lover.
But he's in the ocean with his driftwood, tumbling over and over into the riptide, and he, I'm sure, is wishing he were entirely alone. Maybe even the only person for hundreds and hundreds of miles. That's how he is. It's not how he used to be, but it's how he is now.
I no longer think going somewhere as far away as I can fly will fundamentally change who I am. Or how my relationships go. Or make anything less complicated.
That helps.
