Dearest Doug,
In this case, the vault is a floppy disk - !! A moment I captured fifteen years ago at the last writing retreat I applied to before I met you. I had a vague hope that there was some good advice from my then-older self to my younger self about what to do when I missed my ex and our shared memories.
Alas, no.
But interesting as an artefact, to see how much (I think!) my writing has improved since I wrote this. (And yes, to note how far I've come.)
Onwards, with love.
Without a Map
All travellers have a few fantastic stories. Riding the Hiram Bingham from Cusco to Machu Picchu. Getting lost somewhere in Japan and being offered a beating fish heart in a sushi bar. Trying to explore Cairo in a painfully gritty sandstorm. Being joined on a dive on the Great Barrier Reef by seven minke whales.
Over time I’ve polished these anecdotes, shared them at gatherings often enough that my syntax and pacing almost make them sound like someone else’s story that I’m simply re-telling.
Always searching for something, I spent twenty-one years travelling from country to country. Everywhere I looked for one moment that would solidify the experience in my mind and remind me of the difference between one perfect sunrise and another. I delight in the more obvious – sitting by a Queen of the Night on the only evening of the year it unfolds into flower or passing through a remote hilltown on the same day as the Dalai Lama – but I also seek out the more obscure like finding, fifty years later, a café in Calcutta where my Dad once ate, an island about which nothing is written.
In Montevideo I wanted to see the sea lions.
And that was the start of my most unexpected journey – that evening in Montevideo. In an avant-garde Italian restaurant I broached the subject looming between my husband and I like a uncrossable mountain range. As my nouvelle tasting platter of pasta arrived I took a sip of the strong Argentine red. “I’ve been studying the Rotarian four-way test,” I said. “I really don’t see where it’s OK for a sergeant-at-arms to have an extramarital affair with his president-elect.”
He didn’t compose himself quite quickly enough. Still, I had to say the words out loud. “You and R___ are having an affair.” And with those words I embarked upon a journey with no advance planning. I hadn’t spent hours in bookstores, the library and online, researching points of interest and looking at glossy guide book photos. I’d spoken to no one else who’d been here before me, had no ideas real or preconceived to guide me.
For years he’d denied all his infidelities and claimed I was insane until I almost believed him. My single hope – that he would take this last opportunity to speak the truth – was not to be realised. The relief at leaving an abusive marriage didn’t come for over eighteen months; that night I was only broken. My dream he might one day change was destroyed under his cruel, uncaring gaze, and I cried loud, ugly tears over my beautiful, untouched pasta.
Suddenly I was travelling without a map to help me navigate the alien terrain. Separation. Divorce. No sign posts or landmarks to guide me when I was lost. There was a new language to learn but no phrase book and no one else with whom to speak it.
Like a nightmare from which I couldn’t wake myself, I carried on through Uruguay and Argentina with this man who no longer loved me. He barely spoke, I could barely breathe. The sea lions, when I found them, were blurs through my tears. I have no photographs, not a single scrapbook page of those weeks. At Miami airport I boarded a plane heading north to my sister and her family while he flew south to our island home and his mistress. I watched as we circled above Toronto, wondering how the deeply familiar city with its CN Tower and Skydome skyline suddenly looked as foreign as the moon.
I have often travelled solo, but I have never been as alone as I was this time.
Although I adore the freedom of a one-way ticket, I usually have a vague idea of how long I’ll be away and always before I’ve known that I can return to the place from where I started. I have many homes – my mother still lives in the house where I was born and I have left boxes of books with friends across the world with the understanding they mark a spot to which I will always be welcomed back. I used to say I carried my roots with me, but suddenly I had no roots. I wasn’t sure I’d recognise the end of my trip. There’d be no flight back to anywhere, no real way to know I was done, it was over.
The days from that evening in Montevideo to this moment are not ones I care to recall in great detail. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was right. That journey – starting at Denial with far too long a stopover at Depression – took me the best part of three years. Some days I wondered if Acceptance was just a fiction meant to keep one from suicide. The cost – financial, physical, emotional – the cost has been astronomical.
I have now reached forty without the happy marriage and children I always thought for sure were in my future. No career, just a series of jobs, some more interesting than others. And now stories sadly familiar to many others who have travelled this route, which I have not built into polished anecdotes. I talk out loud, instead, to my new companions, insomnia and loneliness, during the night.
When I miss my ex-husband because I can no longer turn to him and ask “remember when?” about a restaurant we discovered, a path we followed, a breath-taking moment we shared, I remind myself it’s not true that no one else was there and I have no one else with whom to relive the memory. I was there. I have always been there. Here I am.
Can it have taken me forty years to grasp the most basic concept that one can not run away from oneself? Is it perhaps time for me to stop peering over the edge of the horizon in wonder and instead look inwards? Maybe it was not the sea lions I was really searching for in Montevideo, or the orchids in Costa Rica or the Rhone off the coast of Salt Island. Maybe all this time I have simply been searching for myself.
Maybe I needed this mapless journey to guide me to exactly the place I am supposed to be.
