Breathless

There are two things in this world I love doing more than anything else : reading and writing. There isn`t a book in this world that someone would have to force me to read. I will read anything eagerly and willingly, genre or theme irrelevant. And any piece of work my eyes start skimming ignites a spark within me and my body is immediately overcome with an urge to write about it. And if I don`t write specifically about the thing that I`m reading, I express my thoughts and feelings and inspirations that the reading provoked within me. Regardless of what each book makes me want to write, as I turn each page I find myself inching closer to a notepad and pencil or my laptop if it`s near.

Only moments ago (or maybe an hour at most) I sat down on my parents’ couch and stared reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. The book has been turned into a film starring Julia Roberts and me being me, if a movie that I want to see was first a book I have to read the book before I see the film. So staying true to form, I opened this book which documents the author’s personal pilgrimage to self-fulfillment and I was immediately sucked in.

There are many obvious reasons why I would be drawn to this book : I am a world traveler, the author is a world traveller, I am a young aspiring writer, she is a young writer, she left the country with the intention of finding herself and inner-happiness, I left the country with no specific intentions and found in me exactly what she was looking for. The writer in me tears apart her sentences, re-reading the ones I personally dislike, re-reading the ones I find beautiful, and forcing words I never think to use into my brain so I`ll refer back to them in my future writings. Like the word breathless for example. It is such a beautiful world; used in it`s literal meaning and used more metaphorically it brings life to what would have been just another sentence lost in a page of countless words. I would never think to use the word breathless out of its immediate translation and I am almost envious of this already-successful-writer that she thought to use it, and that she used it well.

I am still at the very beginning of the novel, the author has just barely gotten to Rome, Italy. Which ironically was the last city I visited before returning home from Paris so it is still the freshest in my mind. The way she describes isolated situations and finds personal meaning in every fountain she goes to triggered a rather ambitious idea within me. I regret not keeping travel journals throughout the 10 countries I visited in Europe and not recreating my experiences on paper immediately after I returned home. But I forgive myself since I have one more year abroad and can document what I see through my eyes in hopes that I create something worth reading.

The idea that came over me while reading her book was that I want to become more independent. I want to isolate myself in an unfamiliar world. I want to travel alone is basically what I`m getting at. In all my travels over the past year I only kind of traveled alone twice (Brussels and Dublin). And both times I wondered to myself how people did this for months at a time since I was struggling with mere hours of solitude (I was only ever alone for a day or two at most). But I find that the times when I am alone with myself are the times my mind becomes most intimate. I indulge in the nuances of life that appeal to me at each moment and I even embrace life`s most hidden secrets that I myself try to keep out of the forefront of my mind. I pity the people who can`t stand to be alone, who are so dependent on the presence and opinions of others that they fail to ever know themselves completely. I want to be the opposite of these people. I want to make myself so vulnerable to what the world has to offer that I in essence become more than just a constituent of the world. I don`t want to live idly as a glimmer of existence in this universe. I want to show myself to the world all the while letting the world in. I don`t know where I want to start, how I am going to do this, or even why at this point. But every journey has a beginning, and I can already start to see the footprints I`m leaving behind . . .

Half the World Away

All of my days are now split into two distinct parts : the hours that I can maybe, hopefully, potentially, possibly talk to him, and the hours that I can`t. During each part time trickles at an incalculable rate, so much so that it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish the standard 24-hour day at all. I`m constantly living in two different time zones ; in two different worlds where one ceases to acknowledge the other. In one my life is tangible, concrete, now. The other is abstract, founded on hope and an incessant longing for something uncontrollable. Both days revolve around luck, chance, fate even, for those who are hopeless romantics. I`ve developed a sort of dependency on all the cables and wires and little invisible connections that magically link us to one another. There is no checking in, there are no calls just to say “hi,” there are no good night kisses or notes to wake up to on the breakfast table. I am the walking, living, breathing example of distance. Distance in time, distance in space, distance in a world that is growing smaller by the second. Some days are too short, some days are too long, my todays are his yesterdays, my future is his present. The world has pulled us apart, separated us by an unchanging invincible distance, only to leave us with a closeness in our hearts that always pulls us back together, no matter how far in time or space we have travelled.