I didn't sleep well Saturday night. Whether entirely due to chicken nachos consumed before bed or the impending move is hard to say. I never feel anxious about my moves (though they're often comically nothowiplanned), but I often lose sleep the night before one. Something about the change makes me wakeful and ready. I've always been like that, perhaps because I always have to be.
* * * * *
I've lived a lot of places. Some for a very short time, some for a moderately longer time, only one for more than seven years, and then not by choice. My parents were stable, non-military, and lived in the same area my whole life. We moved once that I remember and twice in reality (once I was two, so I can't really claim to remember anything except photographs of the oldest of our accommodations). None of the rest of my family is restless, but I always was.
* * * * *
I have trouble differentiating places I have "lived" and places I have "traveled". Somehow I've always felt like I was traveling. Unsure of what the parameters of labeling it as "living" were. Does it have to do with length of time? Does it mean you didn't have anywhere to return to? Does it mean you worked while you were there? I still couldn't tell you.
* * * * *
By the time I was twelve, while my peers were discovering crushes, having sleepovers, and happily going on family vacations to exotic New Jersey, I was begging mom and dad to let me climb on a plane from our native Virginia to Perth, Australia.
"You're twelve. Of course you aren't going." They underestimated me back then.
It took two years to convince them to let me go, but they eventually gave in, and I was bound for a month in Australia riding in a roo-bar bus, wearing thick face-paint, and eating fat white grubworms straight from the ground. After that, I'd caught the travel bug bad.
I came back from Australia with stories about baby kangaroos and loud tin roofs and the happy news that I'd signed up to spend two months of my summer in Africa the next year. My parents, who had believed the Australia thing would quench my thirst, were shaken. My dad declared that I wasn't going and I told him God was bigger then he was. (This is my favorite preacher's kid response. I used it quite often throughout my teenage years—always with the backing of my grandfather, who is also a preacher).
Africa. If Australia enhanced my travel bug, Africa left it unshakably rooted in me. Two months in an open-air bus driving from South Africa to Botswana to Zimbabwe to Zambia and back again, left me wide eyed and breathless. I'd been happygolucky before then, but I really learned the value of what little I needed. How little I could live on. How resourceful a person could be. We washed our hair in orange buckets of cold water and shivered til' it dried. We dug a latrine in Zambia, where the ground is essentially one giant rock. I washed my feet with baby wipes, and when I ran out I defaulted to sanitizer and socks. And I got the desert sands in my sandals in a way that, according to the locals, you can never shake out.
2001 rolled around and with it came a planned trip to Nepal. Unfortunately for the Nepalese people and for us, a week before our trip the prince turned on his family and slaughtered them all. The country was thrown into chaos and the anxious-teenage-travelers re-routed to a more manageable Thailand.
Chiang Mai is one of the places that I feel that I've "lived". The two months in Africa were spent mobile, pitching tents, taking them down, moving on. The two months in Thailand were spent in Chiang Mai, four girls to a room, sleeping on two chairs pushed together and then a bed on the floor. Only switching locations once, and spending the majority of our time with the same people—teaching English in one-room classes to eager Thai students. Knowing things about Pom and Raai's lives, knowing my way around the city. Going "home" to Virginia kept getting harder. I was 16 years old.
"Where are you going next year?" my parents asked.
"Costa Rica."
I graduated when I was 17 and because there was much to be done for college and a family reunion and to quench my parents' firstchildleaving need to spend every moment with me, I agreed to cut my travel time down to two weeks.
Costa Rica was my favorite place to eat. Rice and beans for every meal and I never tired of the indigenous spices and the chicken or fish that came with them. To this day I wish I could make rice and beans like that. I'd never eat anything else.
Back from Costa Rica I made a more permanent move, to a small state-school in Pennsylvania's mountains. I spent my first year in an all-girls dorm on the third floor of, what I now as a New Yorker term, a walk-up. The dorm was called Harley and we were termed the Harley Hos. This was a direct result of the fact that boys coming out of a co-ed dorm are inconspicuous, even if they have been sleeping with the girl on the third floor. But boys coming out of Harley are as conspicuous as an eight year old in a biker bar. It wasn't that anyone on my floor was getting more than the girls in Mowrey Hall, but that everyone knew about it. I wasn't interested in any of that, but I was severely peeved at boys using the ladies room because they didn't want to walk to the first floor all the time. That was my biggest complaint.
That next summer I left for what I believed would be my last great trip for a long while. Two months in Peru.
Cuzco. Macchu Picchu. Lima. Pisco. Tea made from cocaine leaves. Tiramisu made with real rum. Dramatic performances. And the quest to eat cuiz. Peru is a jumble of the strange and amazing. I came back to college refreshed and bright-eyed. Still in love with the world. Still in love with Pennsylvania. Still in love with life. Bright-eyed.
My second year in Pennsylvania I relocated to upperclassmen apartments across campus with five other girls. We had an open-door policy, which essentially meant that our room was a smaller version of the student union. People donated food and drinks and we gave them out free. We had air hockey and movie nights and hosted any number of parties. It was an amazing year, but time for yet another move, after, of course, the trip I didn't expect.
The two months I spent in Peru were (apparently) exemplary and at the end of that trip I won an award. The missionary organization I'd been traveling with wanted me to come back the next year, so an award and a scholarship was in order. I took that opportunity to sign up to spend two weeks in the Bronx, New York in 2004.
We did children's programs and community programs and enjoyed the company of a handful of committeds from a sweet local church. I decided I would someday live in New York. Someday.
Two weeks later, back in Virginia, then Pennsylvania again. I did college in three years, due to the home-schooling and the community college courses and, you know…the extreme intelligence.
My third year I moved back across campus, where it was quieter, and lived on the third floor of another walk up called Keiffer. There were three seniors in the whole building and we bonded. Jeremy and I went for late night runs—rain or shine—and I spent time with Emilee playing playstation in her room. Mature seniors that we were. That year also spawned a ten day road-trip through the southern USA. New Orleans jazz and chicken in Alabama and laying on a Florida beach. And then back to PA to hike parts of the AT and swoon over my best friend and his piano-playing gorgeousness.
Post-graduation I visited Virginia and returned inevitably to Pennsylvania to wait out the dream-job and the dream-boy, waitressing and waiting for a year before both blew up inexplicably in my face.
It was the reason I needed to live in New York.
I quit my job, gave notice to my landlord, packed up my little car, and traveled. Washington D.C., Virginia, Colorado, Lancaster, PA, New York City. I made my rounds and then bought a one-way train ticket to New York City in order to sleep on a couch in queens and find the dream job.
Four interviews a day, trips to Chinatown for Malaysian cuisine with my generous host ivie, and long walks in the city (as, without money, there isn't much else to do but take walks). That's how it all started. Two weeks in the exhausting interviewing ended and I started at my current soho boutique job. Still I lived with ivie for another month or two, sleeping on a futon in the main room with the lights on often, and trying to avoid the investation of cockroaches living in her cupboards.
Building up some amount of funding landed my apartment search in closet-sized East Village spaces. I hit the jackpot on 5th street with a Californian beauty whose name was a lie. When I first moved in with The Lie she watched the Emmy Awards while I moved box after box into the fourth floor walk up, crying in the Uhaul in-between legbreaking trips up the stairs. I cajoled a stranger on the sidewalk into carrying my bookshelf with me and paid a homeless man to watch my truck. And I should have known from the start that The Lie would be a bad roommate, but I did what I do in all my bad relationships: deny deny deny!
Eventually I couldn't take it anymore, so I broke the lease and moved to Brooklyn. Park Slope was the best of New York to me. Privately owned coffee shops with gardens out their back doors. Wine bars that serve tiny chocolates and sparkling Prosecco. Prospect Park, bursting with dads teaching sons to play baseball and women sunbathing and soccer leagues and family picnics all summer long. The small corner store where I never had to wait in line. And neighbors that held out a hand if you needed one.
After Brooklyn (yesterday) comes the Upper West Side –another part of Manhattan, more undiscovered a new to me. But only for a week before Europe and then Colorado.
And still it keeps going.
Sometimes it exhausts me, all this moving. All this shaking things up. But most times I love it. I breathe it. I can't help it.
And that's why my mom calls me her gypsy girl. Blink and I'm gone.
By the way, if you made it through that, here's your REWARD. You might pee yourself. Just saying.
Gg
