The Tether

(Originally written September 15th, 2015, days before arriving in Denver where I have spent the last year and more)

Long loves and lives meander, this much I can tell you. What is harder to admit though is that I think I once figured them all crocheted snug to my skin.

It's a nice thought. The tether of time and distance is immutable, yeah, but it's also pretty plain. It seems that the more I know myself through amassing lived lives, the less I know the lives of others. Even the ones I loved so dearly. Even the ones I miss; even the ones I call.

Despite every new day, I still see emptiness around me often enough. If you follow the horizon a stretch or more down the road, there it is steeped in stillness; the stasis ever haunting. Should I just get a dog then? Does Asia truly hold more mystery than all of that? It feels like nowhere truly holds much privilege, just that it is simply not here.

The Solitary

(Originally written April 27th, 2014)

The lights are dim save for the flicker of the bulbous tv in the corner. On it plays a kung-fu movie dubbed in Croatian but with French subtitles. I like to hope that the driver doesn't know French, as he seems to be the only one watching.

There is a dying rhinoceros on this bus too. It is very early in the morning now, and I have had a lot of time to come to this perfect analogy.

After another catastrophic snort, one of the old ladies (of which there are more than several) submit what I can only imagine is their own interpretation in Croatian. The rest who asuredly are not asleep either, respond in an explosion of laughter. It suddenly becomes abundantly clear that besides me, the two drivers, and a dying rhino, the entire bus is old ladies. I must have missed it when I drunkenly stumbled on the bus. Now, sober as one can be under the circumstances, I am surrounded by what I liked to my mental image of the term “knitting club,” only maybe they've had a few a few drinks and for some reason are on overnight bus from Munich to Zagreb.

There is another jab at the rhino’s dignity (whatever in this moment he could even possess, the poor asshole), and now they are really rolling. It goes back and forth, left rows and right, with each line they get more excited and shrill. The bus's restless culminates into hysteria until, finally, he wakes when one pokes him for the loudest of the crew to land just the most killer of jokes.

Is he mortified? No, he is hardly even perturbed. Turns out he doesn’t give a fuck. Not even a little one. After one solitary admonishment he passes out super hard and resumes his patented chaotic consortium of throat tremolo once again.

Seconds later from the back of the bus comes another Croatian squeak, and the bus is boisterous again, rolling along through the European borderlands.

To be honest, while there have surely been innumerable times throughout my travels where an abstract tongue has caused me an envious desire to learn more languages, there never once was so much or more than in this moment, this insane eruption of giggles at three-in-the-morning. Have you ever heard a belly laugh from a bus full of Croatian golden-aged women? It is surely a sound I'll hold close long after the bus docks, the plane lands, and this journal lost and forgotten.

In the mean time we careen into the rainy night like thus. The driver hyped on karate, stampeding a bus full of hi-jink knitters, a rhino, and me, towards, presumably, Croatia.

The Unravel

The night fades to the clicking of the U-Bahn, the blink of the ferris wheel, and the filling look of an old cobbled spire from our revolving vista. It is so supremely Germanic, especially after two Maß in a beer hall. Suddenly, the surreal-ness of my departure is overwhelming, until suddenly again, it just isn’t anymore. The spire slips back behind Frühlingfest's carnival backdrop.

I find my seat on the bus after plying it from the first old lady to give up and move her bag. The paramount moments once a subway ride away pale to the rhythm of the unraveling weeks. Then, the unkempt days of a candy bar brunch just for the 75 cent cash-back (laundry money). The unwavering smell of spring stumbling out of thin air, heralding in the indomitable nature of who-the-fuck-knows-what-next. The patter of rain on the empty Abrahms windowsills as I walk through its faded halls, echoing its nothing at all but the 'zzt-zzt' of motion sensing lights.

It is too early for the sex-shop to be open in Zagreb’s bus station. The immediate presence of a sex shop in such a public place coupled with the fact that it is one of the few hours it is closed evaporates the last drops of beer from behind my eyes. It is so gray in the infinite dawn of a cloudy day. For a moment, my soul wants for my bed, but even before I can remember that I no longer have one of those, in a questionable where with an indiscernible when, I start to wonder why. Why the constant upheaval? Why the hungry discontent? Why not Colorado?

Between a cracked plastic pane I find the teller. We both know the name of where I'm going, but we are unable to share much else. The rain is intermittent on the way to Karlovac, but the promise is blooming and constant. On the side of the road, looming concrete-grey Soviet-era apartment towers bleed a darker grey. Their expressionless facades mingle with a day that shares only the hue.

Now, at the next station, I order a cappuccino from Vilma. It costs less than a euro and it is all flavor and foam. There is this delicate sweetness too that starts to rub at the edges of the wandering stark. No one in this country knows my name. And after a thought or two, I am perfectly fine with that. I remember then, again, why the boxes and roads. The desolation and destitution makes sense in the slow sip.

And I think, just one more bus. Then, later, maybe another one. And after that probably a few trains or a plane, but right now, just one more bus. One more bus to find another life wanting, begging to be lived and loved. I feel so wonderful to not be in America, Germany, or Italy, and to be somewhere new. It was a feeling I felt so briefly in Slovenia, this fantastic burgeoning wonder.

Another sip of coffee. Another moment in another country where I am anything. Where I am only me, my primordial self. In the departure I may have been essential, but arriving I'm absolutely nothing.

And another sweet sip. And for a moment (maybe a moment before I think about where or when my next sleep will be, the pack on my back, or even the next leg of my journey), for one moment, I am absolutely free.

(Originally written April 27th in a cafe near Karlovac's bus stop)

The Liberated

“This is the best sausage you will ever eat, because this is the sausage you eat as you leave Modena.”

In the train we agreed, it was a fucking amazing sausage. But, we also agreed that it was the worst day of travel we had ever had. Like, ever.

My mother always told me about guardian angels, supreme creatures of necessity. It was always hokey to me, but maybe it helped us sleep.

Today, Bernardo was the name of our guardian angel.

As you travel, the wear is like this emptying spring. When once the electricity of it all held you solidly to the rails, suddenly you realize just how little you have left. Where the hell are you even going? You go from just being this unquenchable desperado searching for the perfect adventure, until suddenly you're just spent; the spring is dry. Then, even a sip of water is an ecstasy, a sleeping bag a euphoria, and a beer an indescribable collapse into release.

His red two-door economy car was our chariot, and it was grander than the K2 rep’s van or even the older couple’s cadillac. A ride before his, we swapped the filthiest words from either side of the language barrier with an Italian truck driver. I wish I had drawings for some of the hand gestures we used. I mean honestly, can we reflect on how such a conversation could even transpire? Only one word can even describe it: absurd. Fucking absurd. But yeah, take all of that, and I can tell you that learning of our math teaching angel’s life was like some sweet music. To spend so many hours looking into the defiant faces of a thousand automobile drivers, never sharing a single word, and then suddenly to be sharing human connection once more! It's the straight stuff.

Despite today holding some of our favorite hitches thus far, despite not even having to sleep in a train station or waking to find a police officer’s light shining in our eyes, even despite Bernardo (god bless him), and hell, even despite making it to the dream-like, canal-etched Venice, today’s end was only relief. Relief from forsaken Modena.

So if you ever see someone holding a sign with “ANYWHERE” on it, bolded and in caps (no matter the language) pick them up. Just do it. Do it.

(Originally written on a train leaving Modena, Italy March 27th, 2014)

The Unaccomplished

The flexing life abroad is found in the serenity of incongruous days. But I have to admit, the closer I come to understand myself blithe, the farther I find myself from a pen.

There is nothing timeless anymore. Each day the horizon is a slow change; the fields and faces flip by like frames.

And so, with dozens of pages left blank in this book I was once so sure I would finish before I finished this journey, I'll continue without the words to patch the cracks and crevices under my thoughtless steps.

It does not end sitting in an American living room like I imagined, but instead left open and wide under the awning of two volcano perched glaciers, in a valley etched on an island floating in the Atlantic. My travels, unfinished, never finished, are forever wild. And my once aching empty simply found lovely in a (finally) wide, wide world.

The Maple Tree

Cobblestones array like the grain of an old tree. The wrinkles catch my wobbling tires, and it doesn't seem to matter how many times I true them. Perhaps it is the wear of age, or maybe it is the inevitable fate of a slim-line tire on the ragged road of a cobbled valley town.

It is spring, again, and life teems from buds, to birdsong, to bugs stumbling out of god-knows-where. It is incredible how much more daydreaming one can find in a few extra hours of daylight. There is really no doubt of my heritage in this land of identity: I am a New Englander, and I exude the seasons like a sugar maple.

And lately home moors my thoughts, even visits me nightly in the dreamscape. In my childhood backyard the snow melts from grass to lemonade and ice-pops, and then to leaves in the same way that the clock turns an hour. The sun might rise over the alps and hang on the horizon and the sun might wrangle you home under a burgundy set sky, but in between is mid-morning, noon, and after.

And you know, sometimes it is not exactly the more that we desire, but just a change of hands, even if the cards are good. We are all fit for our own fates, even if we hate to admit it. I came to Germany for so many reasons, but that was then.

What are the flavors of this bland quiche and passionless coffee? Is it just the taste of habit? I seem to remember scouring the Charles for Boston's best coffee and scone, but that was entirely another life, another love left on another shore. If life is a river, then why is it only when we look back that we can see the shape of the twist and turns? Here, coffee is coffee, it is mercilessly brewed from a smart machine and it is the worst of German Engineering. I think the Bavarians have had too long to figure out their desires.

Well, in the petaled folds of a new spring, I once again find my own desire. In the soft glow of another pleasant Bavarian morning, the coffee is stale, and my tires are true (sort of).