I sit tonight unpacking and folding the clothes I carelessly shoved into my duffel bag on Sunday in the still-hungover, midnight rush of knowing my bus to D.C. was leaving at eight on Monday morning. Despite making one of the first responsible decisions of my life to go back to Charlotte and work out my notice at my job, once again I found myself walking out early on a last-minute ticket. Suddenly everything seems dizzyingly familiar. It was almost exactly two years ago I ran from my finance career in Charlotte without looking back. The weekends in D.C. that fall turned to weeks, just as they did this time around. And before I knew what I was doing I skipped my flight back to work to stay in bed with the boy I thought I loved back then, the catalyst in the crazy chain reaction that changed my life.
Knowing I had nothing left to give to Charlotte, I gave everything else away as well. Jeep-loads of what I had accumulated in four years at a lucrative job without a care for the money I spent on them were suddenly nothing but garbage to me. And now, two years later, everything I own, save for my books, fits into a big black duffel bag and the backpack that took me around the world. So how, after everything, did I end up here again?
Despite the eerily tumbling similarities of my reckless runaway to D.C. two years ago and my spontaneous Sunday night decision this time around, something is different. In the week leading up to this second take at a city I love I am surrounded by artists, writers, and inspired bums. People that mimicked my same graceless exit from their nine-to-five existence because they knew they had no other choice but to chase whatever it was, whatever it is. And in the midst of the cultural renaissance blooming in this city there isn’t a breath of doubt within me that I need to be here.
The first job I interviewed for, and the one that was perfect for me, loved me and hired me immediately. The first day I arrived back to look for apartments I found one a block away from that job in Bloomingdale, an aptly named neighborhood I already love as well. And just days after the universe told me that this was the place I needed to be, I met a boy who finally broke the curse of soon-snuffed sparks and shitty sex that had followed me since the poet. Everything just kept falling effortlessly into place.
Leaving Charlotte two years ago needed to happen more than anything else in my life before. But I had no clue where I was supposed to be, only where I wasn’t. Despite everything I told myself back then, I came back when I did for that boy. And driving through the middle of the night on one of my dependably impulsive whims I felt utterly lost on a road I’d driven a thousand times before. Within a week he was barely talking to me, within a month I had been fired from my job, within two months his friend drove my beloved Jeep into a pole, and within three I was on a plane to New Zealand.
But is the universe really so simple? Is it always so easy to know what we are supposed to do, to find a new path at the first signs of struggle? Shouldn’t we have to work for what is right against all odds? It’s as if what I think I want and what I truly need are so seldom aligned, I can only ever stumble across wrong decisions until I inevitably trip and fall onto the right path. And the harder I’ve fought to follow those mistaken trails, the more fraught with complications they’ve always become.
The last perfect path I thought I’d found was South Korea. Within a month of arduous planning it amassed quickly into a horizon of insurmountable disasters until I was forced to resign myself to staying in Charlotte. Until this past week, a one-way ticket to Bogota, Colombia was what I was sure I needed. I leave January 18th, 2012. I had a plan. I had to leave America. I couldn’t be here any longer. Every minute I spent here suffocated me more and more. Since the moment my toes first touched American soil after a year abroad I shook and sobbed and pleaded silently within myself to do everything in my power to leave.
Suddenly, that ticket is an option, a vacation. Will I even have the money to leave in January? Will I want to? Living in a place that for the first time in years carries with it no longing, no burdens, being surrounded by the people I love and missed the most, the effervescent excitement of someone to flirt with, to fuck, to fall for, and a job that excites me the same way, am I even still a traveler when this is what I want? Of course I want to go South America, but I know it just means giving it up all over again.
It is hard not to think that all the traveling I have done so far has been running away. Running away from bad decisions and discontent, desperate to find answers knowing they can’t possibly lie in places I’ve already looked. There are no doubts in my head that it was right, that I needed every ounce of it. I fed on the challenge, the strength that came from being alone in ever-different, ever-dazzling places. I learned who I am, and what I need, and what I don’t. The beauty and simplicity of life in those countries still haunts me and begs me to return. But for the first time in a long time, I am comfortable. I have a room that is mine, a place to put the few things I have left that I have carried from couch to couch and hostel to hostel for years now, and I want for nothing. Maybe after so long on the tired vagabonding trail, I’m just ready for things to be easy again.
I look around the bare, dingy walls of the tiny room I moved into just yesterday and unfold the collection of maps and letters that I have carried with me across five continents. Taping them to the walls and putting up the few pictures I keep with me I collapse on the bed with a glass of wine and realize, for the first time in two years, I have a home.
Whether this place will stay my home, whether or not the universe will violently shove me from this country in the same series of undeniable events that unfolded two years ago, I can’t possibly know.
The only thing I do know is that I am happy. And for now, that is the biggest difference in the déjà vu of my hapless decisions of years past. Because at this moment everything couldn’t feel any more right. The same infallible certainty I felt on the plane to New Zealand, and in the Cambodian countryside, exists again in me now. The stone strong sensation that you are meant to be nowhere but exactly where you are is impossible to ignore. And maybe when January rolls around I will be ready to leave, the exit signs passing ever quicker on the side of the road begging me to get off. But even if it all crumbles to ash tomorrow, I can’t possibly deny what the universe is telling me today: to stay.
