A Second Trip to the End of the World
This photo was taken almost a year ago today. It’s a picture of me and two of my dearest friends at the end of the world.
That’s me who’s closest to the edge. Erin’s behind me and Truman’s behind her. We’re walking out to the tip of the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. You can see the white capped swirls where the currents collide. Each rushing determinedly in its own direction to get where it’s going, only to smash and churn and get kicked back out to where it came from. I remember it being surprisingly loud for such a remote spot with three lone humans crawling up it – wind whipping off the water and over the rocks. Surf pounding below us. I remember thinking about all the ships and all the men that had gone down in that exact spot hundreds of years ago – maybe still down there somewhere, maybe swept off hundreds or thousands of miles away. Maybe pulverized by converging oceans since 1400 and indistinguishable now from the sand. We’d driven out along the coast that morning and gotten coffee at a roadside stand – literally. It was a tiny, single-window coffee stand perched on a trailer hitch, fueled by a generator that was plugged into the purveyor’s beat up Toyota, which was parked just off the road a couple feet shy of the cliff face. We’d watched the fog roll over the mountains and slowly evaporate as the sun rose. We’d spotted an ostrich picking its way across a grassy hillside by the water (I, for one, had no idea how effing huge those things are). And then we made our way to the edge of the Cape of Good Hope, stood there for a few minutes taking it in, turned around and drove back to the city.
It was the first week of July. I’d made plans to go on the trip at the end of January – a couple weeks after the first time the guy I was with freaked out and left. I remember being in Reji and Hilary’s spare room in Seattle and watching snow fall on the trees in the backyard (all good friends support you through a breakup; these two have routinely housed me, gotten me out into the mountains whether I thought I wanted to go or not, and nursed me back to relative-normal with a steady diet of homecooked food and Fremont Brewing B-Bombs). I had to remember to keep lowering my voice that morning because it was just shy of 6am local time and Truman, Erin, and I were basically screaming at each other over FaceTime about how excited we were and how many Amex points we were gonna have to blow on the plane tickets.
Erin sent me the photo of us a couple days ago. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. I have a complicated reaction to it. It’s so beautiful. Perfect, really.
I remember what I was thinking about when it was taken. I was thinking about him. We’d gotten back together in March. And ever since I’d worried about the trip I’d been so excited to book. I was going for two weeks. Could I hold things together if I was that far away for that long? Could I keep him and us steady from the other side of the world? I came home twelve days after this picture was taken and it was wonderful. I came home from a week away with other friends in November when he ended things for the last time. And a few days after that I was signed up for Reji’s January 2020 trip to kick around in the mountains of New Zealand. We landed in Queenstown a year after I’d been in his spare room, heart aching and credit card out, booking my trip to Africa.
Sometimes patterns are so obvious they’re borderline embarrassing.
I don’t love that I’ve let “travel” become synonymous with “coping mechanism.” When I design it to be a distraction or an escape from something or someone, that something or someone tends to be the one goddamn thing I can’t get out of my head while I’m away. Which makes it ineffective in addition to being monetarily inefficient – bad combo. And when what’s driving you to go somewhere is everything that place is not – not a place we were together, not a setting in a shared memory, not a place that feels like ours – it’s impossible to see it for what it is. And that’s worse than embarrassing or ineffective. That’s a waste.
I remember the moment that made me decide that I was going to be a traveler. It wasn’t the first trip I’d taken outside of the U.S. But it was the first time I decided I was going to spend my life seeing the world. I’d just turned 30 and I was in Thailand for a business trip, the first really big one I’d ever taken. We had a day off in between meetings and my account partner had scheduled a guided tour for the two of us to go see Ayutthaya, the old capital, a two-or-so hour drive outside of Bangkok. We left our hotel in the dark and pulled up to the temple ruins just as the sun was rising. The city is encircled with stone buddhas tens and tens of feet high. They’re seven hundred years old. Each morning the monks come out and drape each sun-bleached, moss-covered statue in sparkling gold silk robes. Most of the buddhas in Ayutthaya are headless. The head is the most sacred part of the buddha, and for centuries thieves would come into the city at night with whatever tools they could find to chip away at stone, and would flee with a stolen buddha head back to wherever they’d come from. The thieves had to work in teams because the heads are enormous and impossibly heavy for one or two people to carry.
In the center of the city, between two soaring temples, there’s a stone buddha head that lies on its left cheek on the ground. Legend has it that the thieves who removed it centuries ago couldn’t bear the weight of it and dropped it before they reached the outer walls and made their escape. A bodhi tree has grown up around it – the roots encircling but not covering the buddha’s face. People come from hundreds of miles away to visit and pray to it. It’s considered blasphemous to be eye-level with the buddha, so one by one pilgrims crawl army-style on their elbows and knees to approach the ancient stone head and pay their respects. It was the most incredible thing I’d ever seen. I don’t know exactly how long I stood there watching – a long time. I didn’t take any pictures. I didn’t think about anything other than the magic that was happening right in front of me. I think I’ll remember it until the day I die.
That trip, and the ones I took afterward until 2019, all made me want to run toward things. Sights and experiences and cultures. Vineyards and cathedrals. Beaches in Phuket and canals in Amsterdam. I want to get back to that feeling. I want my world to get big again. I want to set out on adventures because I want to go there – not because I don’t want to be here.
I don’t want to keep running away.
On Tuesday I’m going to give it a shot. A couple of my best buddies and I are going eke what little silver lining we can from our working remote situations. We’re packing up the car and driving to Key West for the month of July. Two of my closest friends and me, heading to the end of the world (at least as close as you can get inside the contiguous United States, now that we’ve officially and deservedly worn out our welcome abroad).
My long-time mentor Paul told me a few months ago: “the definition of futility is wishing for a different past.” I think that’s really right. But I’m still going to think of this as a do-over. A chance to explore a new place I’ve never been to before. To work under palm trees and in open air cafes. I’m going to scuba dive for the first time since that fateful vacation I took last November, and I’m going to do it for me. I’m going to learn how to surf. I’m going to ride a cruiser bike around the island in my sweet new helmet. I’m going to love being there with my friends who love me.
And I’m going to be and feel the way I look in that photo Erin sent me. Out in front. At the edge but not over it. Head up. Eyes open. Looking forward.
