Wanderlust

I have often wondered to myself what life will be like when I am eventually forced to stay in one place for more than nine months at a time.  Although we were certainly fortunate enough, when I was young, to take yearly family vacations, we were relatively stationary and our lives relatively stable.  However, since the age of fifteen, I have constantly been on the go.  In college, my roommate tended to joke that I was not actually from one state, but that I was from the United States given my propensity to travel all around the country during our time off from school.

Relative to many families, most notably those with ties to the military, the church, diplomatic missions or large international companies, my propensity to move is hardly remarkable.  And my travels have usually taken me down relatively safe and well-travelled paths.  

Nonetheless, I take a certain pride (perhaps unwarrented) and an enjoyment from having seen many different corners of the US and the world.  I easily recognize myself in some of the lyrics of the Dixie Chicks song "The Long Way Around". And yet, while I still plan to continue to visit and explore new locals, the time of "settling down" is rapidly approaching.  Even as I type those words, I sense the pang of ambivalent emotion that Joanne Harris describes through her main character Vianne Rocher in Chocolat:

"Places all have their own characters, and returning to a city where you have lived before is like coming home to an old friend.  But the people begin to look the same; the same faces recurring in cities a thousand miles apart, the same expressions.  The flat, hostile stare of the official.  The curious look of the peasant.  The dull unsurprised faces of the tourists.  The same lovers, mothers, beggars, cripples, vendors, joggers, children, policemen, taxi-drivers, pimps.  After a while one begins to feel slightly paranoid, as if these people were secretly following from one town to another, changing clothes and faces but remaining essentially unchanged, going about their dull business with half an eye slyly cocked at us, the intruders.  At first one feels a kind of superiority.  We are a race apart, we the travellers.  We have seen, experienced, so much more than they.  Content to run out their sad lives in an endless round of sleep-work-sleep, to tend their neat gardens, their identical suburban houses, their small dreams; we hold them in a little contempt.  Then, after a while, comes envy.  The first time it is almost funny; a sharp sudden sting which subsides nearly straight away.  A woman in a park, bending over a child in a pushchair, both faces lit by something which is not the sun.  Then comes the second time, the third; two young people on the seafront, arms intertwined; a group of office-girls on their lunchbreak, giggling over coffee and croissants...before long it is an almost constant ache.  No, places do not lose their identity, however far one travels.  It is the heart which begins to erode after a time.  The face in the hotel mirror seems blurred some mornings, as if by too many casual looks.  By ten the sheets will be laundered, the carpet swept.  The names on the hotel registers change as we pass.  We leave no trace as we pass on.  Ghostlike, we cast no shadow." (192-193)