Why Can't I Just Stay Still?
Oct. 9, 2022 — A Journal Excerpt
The urge to travel, for me, has always festered like the worst of mosquito bites, the kind you scratch until you leave a scar but never leave or learn a lesson.
It’s an itch that multiples, no matter if I ignore it or cave to its temptation, so, if the feeling persists either way, why not satiate myself in the interim? It’s the kind of itch that, when left alone long enough, may dissipate. Only I can’t bring myself to let it be.
Even while writing this metaphor, albeit one that may have lost its center, my body feels physically itchy, though maybe it’s all a trick of the mind. Isn’t everything? I’ve always been someone who can’t squash an idea once it’s entered my head. That’s why writing is therapeutic. It’s also why traveling is insurmountable. Continuing with the contradictions, I’ve also always been someone who plays things safe. I don’t like adrenaline, and I like adventure best when I know how it’s going to go.
Yet my choices and experiences and lifestyle have all proven otherwise, inexplicably at odds with one another, entirely itchy. Perhaps travel is the inevitable result of living through a screen; I work on a computer, so I don’t work with people, so I type and I live in my head, so the outside world is all the more foreign and accessible and enticing.
A high school teacher once told me I have a “quiet confidence,” and at the time I found it insulting, a nice way to pinpoint me as painfully shy — lacking any confidence at all — but smart on paper and in grade. In the years since that wayward compliment, I’ve returned to that description. I think it’s this quiet confidence that’s led me to South America alone, on a one-way flight, without a plan. I’ve traveled extensively through Europe, which has always felt like a gateway continent. Europe is a safe bet, easy in language and transportation, enchanting in curation and cobblestones.
South America, however, feels bolder — but still approachable physically, financially, and mentally. After spending my summer in Boston — which felt, after some time, manufactured, in the sense that it was safe and clean and easy and kind — Buenos Aires popped into my head, and I couldn’t itch it away without physically acting on it. My anxiety manifests like this; I often follow through on adventures that just-so-happened to ease into my brain, like they were there all along. Ideas come to me at random, and I don’t take them immediately, but I deliberate and obsess and eventually decide how to act. I wrote my novel that way.
And I’m in Buenos Aires this way. This far south, cities can only pale in comparison to the mountains, but Buenos Aires holds its own against nature. I want its intensity: a city I can discover in doses, divvied up as neighborhoods, pockets of shops, hole-in-the wall restaurants, winding monuments, and crooked bookstores.
I want a geography, for the first time, to which I have no claims. Argentina is a place that will knock me off my pedestal of I’m from here or I live here or I have time here or I know this place (even though you can never truly know a place). Two months in Argentina will strip me of the luxuries I’ve previously traveled with. Unlike my three prior trips to Europe, I’m not visiting on Dartmouth’s dime, nor am I visiting with any set agenda for anyone outside of myself. I don’t have friends nearby nor do I have any pre-existing knowledge of Argentina’s culture, history, and the like, at least not beyond the mainstream and the stereotypical.
Armed with an elementary understanding of Spanish and a carry-on backpack with exactly one sweater, I want to discover whether I like traveling or simply like traveling to particular places. Does the itch come with contingencies? I picked a place with no preconceptions to bias me and my expectations. I want to know if my creativity changes without the safety net of roots and a lifetime of cultural preparation. I want to know if travel writing is a career worth chasing, if the emotions outweigh the instability and the confusion and the self-doubt and the constant, continuous, drive for momentum. I want to know if my quiet confidence has become regular confidence, and I want to test myself in every which way.
And, perhaps most motivating, I want to answer the questions that have pounded in my brain since COVID-19 uprooted my stability. Have I learned anything from 2019 in Palermo, and can I apply those lessons when it counts? Can I find a new community while taking off the pressure? How do I like to travel, and will I be tired after this, satiated — or just getting beginning to scratch?