I have returned home from my trip and am unpacking. Home’s familiar textures and smells are comforting and reassuring if a little dull. After three weeks of imposing on people with more real estate, our apartment feels smaller than I remember, but my hands, with memory of their own, can still find the light switches in the dark. Each trip is an emotional journey, beginning with excitement, anticipation, and a secret hope that some catharsis will occur, moving through upheaval and disappointment, and ending with acceptance. The chore of unpacking, on the surface rather banal, requires making room in our lives for the new books and toys as well as the memories and stories of the trip.

This last journey contained its share of running madly through the airport, vomiting up and down the coast of California, and being demeaned by security personnel. But it also took me back to two formative places in my life: the rows of colonial-style houses that marked the boundaries of my childhood world and the Northern California town where I attended college/ grad school and really grew up (got my first job, fell in love). Accompanying me on this trip was Alain de Botton’s book The Art of Travel, a good book for thinking about travel as I revisit those places that once nourished me. What do I want from travel, what do I expect of it? How do I unpack and arrange the pieces of travel in my life and understand this gap between home and not home?

De Botton’s book is full of his own personal travel moments, moments that expose the gap between the expectations and realities of travel. In one, de Botton arrives in Madrid laded with friends’ advance reviews of the beauty and importance of the city. But rather than go out and explore, he lays in bed in his hotel room, overcome with listlessness. “And I wondered, with mounting anxiety, What am I supposed to do here? What am I supposed to think?” (106)

The description of this Madrid trip dislodged from some forgotten box of memory my first trip abroad alone, to teach English in Slovakia the summer after my freshman year of college. Seduced by the Futurists’ descriptions of speed and movement I fancied myself an adventurer, conveniently ignoring my shyness, my discomfort with strangers, and the fact that I don’t sleep well when not in my own bed. I felt excited to be at the airport, surrounded by people on the move, swollen with the importance of tasks that would take them across the world. I was glad to escape a summer of nearly identical red brick houses, conversations about resumes, and suburbanites mowing their lawns. The plane’s roaring engines promised power, speed, and results... we jumped into the sky, and hovering in the air, I realized how easily I had become untethered from all that was near and dear. I arrived in Vienna for a three-day stay with no place to stay, no knowledge of German, no idea what I was supposed to feel or think, paralyzed with the terror of suddenly, viscerally, feeling so far from home. I managed to find myself a hostel in which to stay, but as the other students went off to sightsee, I, like de Botton, pulled the covers over my head and wondered how long I could stay in bed before getting too hungry. Eventually, I ventured out to some museums and cafes, but that feeling of being lost, of not knowing what I was doing there, of knowing I was supposed to feel excited but instead feeling terrified, did not retreat. I had 17 somehow fooled myself into conflating movement with progress, external displacement with internal transformation, with the idea that physically “going somewhere” meant I was figuratively “going somewhere” as well.

The Art of Travel captures those desires, curiosities, and denials that bring people to other places. At that point in my youth, I thought of Travel as a modern deity, one who would swoop down from the rafters of an airplane hanger to grant disposition and deliverance. But rather than finding direction or revolution I gained ten pounds and learned to drink dark beer. I saw ghosts.

I was no futurist. A good thing, considering I am a woman and I generally like museums and dislike violence. But I still find myself subconsciously invested in the fantasy that movement will bring transformation and transcendence or, at the very least, provide an escape from the mediocre and mundane. With a college diet of eco-feminists and sub-alternists under my belt (not to mention the viewing of so many Hollywood movies in which the colored native provides enlightenment for the jaded and cynical Western traveler), I search for a place both psychological and geographical, a fictive outside from which to better understand the mechanisms and failures of my life, a place from which to grasp the finitude of those narratives that pen me in (stay at home mom or working mom?) or pin me down (why didn’t you finish your PhD?), from the invisible tracks that guide our lives (white picket fence, job security, comfortable salary, retirement benefits, societal respect). A roundabout solution to an idiosyncratic identity crisis (how do I teach my kids about their mixed cultural heritage?). An experience inoculated against the prosaic, each moment part of an adventure, each misstep coated with the glamour of a good party story about ex-pat life (or at least a funny blog post). Like a near-death experience, traveling can allow you to reevaluate and reassess your values and your relationships. Travel “suggests with what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered” (37).

And living abroad has, to some extent, given me that fictive outside. The pull of the white picket fence and the academic career are weak here, the Jones live too far away to keep up with, and I carry my own portable exotic aura with which to fight feelings of mediocrity. This life of travel frees up the mental energy I used to expend trying to hold the nagging “why-aren’t-yous” at bay.

It helps this time around, to be older and a little wiser. But more than that I am fortified in this journey by my fellow traveler. Like war buddies, the survivors of a common disaster, or co-workers who have logged long hours on a difficult project, my husband and I are bound together by our idiosyncrasies — no one else quite understands the categories and unarticulated stockpile of experiences that inform my consciousness of the world the way that he does. He understands what “Gangnam ajumma” vs. “Bay Area nouveau riche” means to me the way a fellow American would understand “Coke vs. Pepsi” or “Windows vs. Mac.”

De Botton’s book is called the “art” of travel because he interrogates the hows and whys of travel through the work of painters and writers, but also because he argues that traveling, like art, requires the shaping of one’s vision. Like a painting or a piece of writing, travel can teach us to see the world in a different way, making the mundane landscape colorful, bringing some elements into focus, and eliding others. Making a relationship work involves the same training of vision, an active molding, and carving of one’s priorities and values, of conveniently forgetting how he 18 always loses his glasses and remembering that he is wise. We started out on different continents and in different languages, but for ten years now, through endless conversation and behavioral engineering, we have been sculpting a common vision of how we want to live together in the world. We explore different cities for the tools and materials with which to add to and chip away at this life we are constructing. Perhaps travel no longer paralyzes me the way it did in Vienna because I’m more invested in the process of discovering; perhaps I just needed someone to hold my hand and confirm the validity of my feelings about the world. Our children, however, may need years of therapy.

Many things enable me to travel: my present company, the relative marketability of the skills we possess, some financial freedom, and the psychological support of knowing that if I need to, I can always go home. In some small places in my mind and heart, I have wrapped in tissue paper those rows of colonial houses I once strained to escape. Every once in a while, I take them out, gaze at them, and reassure myself that my old friends and communities are still there for me if I should return, ready with the soft and faded embrace of an old comforter. Or they become my mental voodoo dolls, my every accomplishment to spite them, as I spur myself on with spiteful thoughts of an eventual triumphant “I-told-you-I-could-do-it” return. No longer my whole world nor my sworn enemy, I can now appreciate the way I am loosely tethered to those houses and the people inside them; they hold onto me like the string of a kite.

And when I do return, it is with a loud clamoring in my heart, a desire to run and shout and embrace, though the catharsis of returning is never what I expected. Those houses are still there, and the categories of people are still the same, but I find that they have forgotten me or don’t deign to care what I have done. They have “stuck me on a shelf,” frozen in the same incomplete moment of time in which I have frozen them. Perhaps they were angry that I left and made me into their own voodoo dolls, shrugging at the kind of living I have done since then in places unimagined, unreal, and unimportant to them. I have escaped to my fantasy outside only to find that, in some ironic reversal, the place I left has become a new fantasy outside — the place where I seek redemption and acceptance.

But with no deity to bestow those upon me, I hold on to an idea of myself as a traveler, an adventurer, a perpetual motion machine, dependent upon the idea of movement to defend against ennui and malaise in order to keep running from the straitjacket of categories that haunt me. Each time I pack or unpack, I have to think through what I need and want, which objects are necessary and significant in my life, and how I will use them in the stories and scripts to come. I have come to find peace in motion, in accepting and acknowledging the continued vulnerability of my position, in appreciating the crazy in each place, and learning to love it.

The suitcases are empty now; the shelves have been reshuffled to fit our new books and toys. I swear our clothes have gotten bigger for they no longer fit in the drawers. With the trip behind us, we now laugh about how we almost missed the plane. We make calls to reassure our friends and families that we have arrived safely, giving those tethers a gentle tug just to make sure they are still connected.