Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things — air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky — all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
Cesare Pavese
It’s true that I am not home yet, but this trip will be over soon. I’ll sleep under my own sheets come Thursday. It’s my last day in Mexico City. I have spent it in a resto-cafe-bookstore, reading Japanese fiction (Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata) in English and drinking iced teas of yerba bueno. Tonight I’ll go out for a grand dinner with my brother to celebrate life. It’ll won’t cost us $50, for wine and great Argentinian steaks. At this moment, I feel so intensely satisfied with my lot. I am not yearning for home, nor do I long to stay. I am simply ready to move.
My friend’s apartment is on Hamburgo Street – Hamburg – and all of its intersections are with other great European cities: Praga, Varsovia, Londres. I’ll be in one of those come September, or maybe I’ll pass them each day walking these streets. Mexico City is life, the same as Paris and New York and Tokyo. It is of these places that I dream, of these great works of concrete and steel and hope and sadness and everything else that their cores are made of. And I will find myself in their very center, one day not long from now. I know I will. Once I get there, I’ll hold a spot for you at my cafe table.
There are occasions that allow, and even encourage a complete renegotiation of the elements of your life. The beginning and end of university are two prominent occasions that I think give the individual the opportunity to be utterly introspective of their circumstances.
At this point, there are a million possibilities. Each one of these demand some degree of renegotiation. We are not necessarily conscious of it, but each day we change the relationship we have with the world and people around us. When we are conscious, it can be overwhelming. When we leave a place that we have become attached to, we are inherently aware of the fact that friends come and friends go, and suddenly, friendship becomes a choice rather than an occurrence. It becomes an active commitment to maintain human bonds. Across distance, geographically established acquaintances fade into Facebook’s obscurity. We keep a warehouse of people we can reach out to, blindly, in hopes of rekindling the old romance of some safe place.
(more…)