I once heard a writer talk about travel as a sort of love affair. I did not understand it until just today.
Love is tricky. Love is fickle and powerful and crushing and baffling. Or maybe that’s just us. Maybe love is perfectly simple and we are the troublemakers. I have yet to distinguish the difference for sure, but I’m getting closer. Traveling has made me see love a little more clearly. I fell for London. And it seemed like it fell for me, too. But then I left it. No warning, no goodbye: just gone. And off to a new, drastically different city I went. And while I’m starting to love Edinburgh, a part of my heart still grieves the love I lost. It wonders if I did the right thing. It wonders if London thinks of me or could ever take me back.
I wander Edinburgh desperately wanting to love it. And I do, to an extent, but it’s not the same. I am the star of every classic love story. And I’m the one you can’t stand. The one you want to go for the nice guy, the one that will protect and care for her, but always runs back to her first love.
Now, I am perfectly content to eat cornish pasty’s and mocha’s for the rest of my life as I did today. And walk around the cobblestoned streets and happen upon shows that I want to see, dodging the ever changing weather and intoxicated citizens. But I want to feel that feeling again.
I have hope for me, yet. Falling in and out of love is never easy, but it’s a necessity. I think of it in the same way that I think travel is a necessity. We grow from these experiences, particularly the painful sort. The fact of the matter is that I am not going to want to commit to each city I love, nor am I going to for each person I love. Love forces us to weed through the parts of ourselves we’d rather not address. Travel does, too. Each city makes us feel differently. Isn’t that why we travel, really? To feel? Isn’t that why solider through falling in and out of love? To feel?
Ticket to Write 