Distance and Liberation

A week ago, I was happy. I was free, alive, and satiated. Life felt exciting, new, beautiful, and alluring.

There was a moment of true joy. I was on the train back from Lugano, reading through my journal of the last few months. Each entry expressed agony, disappointment, pain, and hopelessness. Every page gasped for an end. Had I really forgotten how bad it was, how black it was? Here was the proof, my lamentations in ink.

Night and day. There I was on a Swiss train, in first class passage, traveling across some of the most beautiful landscapes ever imagined by calendars and postcards. I had just left idyllic Lugano, charming with its Lombarian Renaissance-style architecture and piazzas linked by narrow streets. I was on my way back to Zurich, my stomach fluttering with anticipatation.

How could such crushing sadness and such tremendous happiness have existed only weeks apart?

I felt elated and liberated. I resurfaced, gulping in the rejuvenating Alpine (filtered through train) air, rejoicing in the distance from my past. If I were in a musical, I would have burst into a song, bright with references to springtime, sunshine, bluebirds, and glistening mountain peaks. Instead, I smiled widely at my reflection, and beamed inside, wishing the train would move faster towards its destination.


And now?

Well, vacation is over. It's curious, thinking back to how wonderful I felt, in comparison to how I feel now. To be trite, the difference is palpable.

I expected to be disappointed upon my return in reaction to the let down of no longer having an amazing vacation to look forward to. Surprisingly, that's not how I feel. I'm excited for the next few weeks--lots of fun outtings planned, even a trip to New York. There are things to look forward to.

But I can't help myself, especially in the evenings, from looking back. I think of how I passed the hours. When will I feel as good again? When will I find someone who I get lost with for hours at a time, without the faintest idea of how it got to be 11pm, or 2am, or 4am? When do I stop missing how good it felt to be held in his arms?

The neat answer is "eventually". It's easy to brush off these late night longings as overreactive romantic tendencies induced by fairly recent heartbreak, jetlag, and stark reality.

After all, life is not a vacation, which is a lesson taught to me by my parents. Life is work, stress, hardship, with pockets of fun hidden within the inside lining. Of course we don't want the holiday to end.

But that's bullshit. Why shouldn't life be more like a holiday? Why shouldn't happiness exist beyond the confines of departures and returns? It must; that's the only right answer. I need to fix this life of mine: patch the holes, paint the walls, update the fixtures--whatever it takes. I'm not entirely sure, honestly, what it'll take, but I feel like I'm a few steps closer to figuring that out now.

I sat on a couch and talked about hopefulness, about finding and tackling love, and was called brave in response. I don't think I'm so brave after all. Idealistic. Romantic. Ridiculous. Amorous. Not brave. If I were brave, wouldn't I have said all of this, and more, aloud? What's the difference between brave and silly anyway?



As an aside, someone said that he hopes my jetlag will be gone by the time we see one another, so that I can reenact the "more exciting parts" of my vacation. I think I must have blushed.