You travel across a country you have mixed feelings about to a land-locked state that taught you how to love, introduced quinoa, kale, and other healthy stuff you hadn’t consumed before, and you crack open your neck in order to see over mountains you’re too afraid to climb.
Whenever you leave, you contemplate what family really means. If you hadn’t given them scars, would they still want to address you. If you didn’t have a title like sister, would you still want to share a meal, a secret, a favor.
When you are alone, you eat slower. You read a book instead of picking conversations from teeth. You listen to the sound of your meal; you call it music; a sloshing around of calories and digestive regrets.
You consider having an affair because that is what people do when they travel. Until you realize that this is the first time in your life love feels like a tent: roomy, warm, with dark sky view.
What you lost: weight. enough skin to make others worry. your hair (it came back). You lost the ability to pretend yourself away.
Here, the architecture of earth is brown, flat, clean(er). Drugs are sold by name-tagged humans. Garbages come in many flavors: compost, paper, plastic, and the rest of it.
It feels easier here, but remember you are on vacation. Remember you can say no to everyone.
Is it so much easier to lose than to find. It is far simpler to travel than remain. We are kinder to strangers than the ones we grew up with. In other words, keep looking.
Aimee Herman 