Read my last travel post for context.
The number of things you have to do only reveals itself when you know you’ll be gone. People have meditated on this thought through the lens of death, and it makes me wonder, is this upcoming trip the death of myself?
My time has been eaten away, leaving my bag empty and my future full. With so so many things to take care of, they slip my mind, the amount too colossal to keep track of fully at any one time. . . .
When I first went to Italy, an eighteen-year-old boy who’d only known home, the world exploded into color. Two years later, working in Italian summer camps made me realize I’d been sleepwalking through life, and that America was not home to me anymore.
Now, after two years’ limitation, I’m going abroad with no return ticket.
Will this again be the death of the old me in place of someone new, as a snake sheds its skin? Knowing myself, this is something that’s already happened, something that’s never-ending.
Travel is the vital key to change, internally or externally. Travel is change. The stress I’m experiencing is simply growing pains, a catharsis of my old self before I enter the unfamiliar landscape of my new life.
Over the past two years, I’ve spent a lot of time inside, physically and mentally. It’s time for some housekeeping, to clear away the dust before my adventure.
I have five days left of work, on the mountain again, as I was the last time before I set out. Yet this was nearly a world ago, before things had changed entirely.
Now I seem much different than the kid who left for Italy in 2019 with hopes of making videos, with an eye half-closed to the future. He was indeed different than me, with a more infantile yet stable mind. He was one who believed in the world as it was and expected it not to change so much as it has.
It’s six forty AM. A responsible man would have left for work by now, I say to myself as I pour a second cup of coffee and take my vitamin pills, but though I want to be that responsible collected person, I can’t afford to be right now, with so many things on my mind and my limited time to see them all through. My past prioritizations are waning.
Two weeks away, I see the end in sight, yet with so much ahead I don’t know if I’ll be able to reach it when I approach the precipice. I’ve tried this before only to have my plans shut down by the world.
Live your way,
Noah 🙂
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