En route to somewhere

Trying to be honest

More than two third of the books I ever read have some parts about traveling or some elements of mobility. One of them is entirely about a person exiling himself from Trinidad to England, and then the northeast of America at the time when black people working in hospitality services were kindly regarded as “negro friends” as a new token of respect that was still under configuration in the aftermath of the civil-right act; and cross-country traveling wasn’t as difficult as it is now.

That said, reading about traveling during covid was extremely brutal. I mean the act of reading books about traveling is already a brutality.

The first country outside of Vietnam I ever visited was Brunei. Extremely random if you ask me, and I was there for a community project I was doing at the time that (helped) tackle youth unemployment, which is an irony in and of itself, cause, look at me now. Nevertheless, it was a lovely place and a nice enough trip. We even got to see the Sultan parading on the street in Bandar Seri Begawan during the Bruneian Independence Day celebration.

Other than that, my bisexual friend, whom I worked on the same project with, teased me: you may have to be extra-closeted for the week after the news about young Bruneian queers running out of the country due to the possibility of being stoned to death broke out four days before our arrival. He was that one confused dude who thought being bi means he’s still holding the straight pass. I simply let him figure it out himself.

My dad is the kind of parent who measures their children’s success by how much they’ve traveled on their own, so I kind of lived by that since I was very young. In fact, I really never liked traveling even though I have the unmatched talent of packing my stuff in less than thirty minutes but still managing to get that done two days in advance. I have terrible traveling anxiety.

So far as I noticed, I will get extremely nauseous and cough a lot the night before the trip and will not get any sleep, a weird condition I should have clinically checked up but never did. And once I step on the bus, there’s a 60% chance I will vomit. I’ve never been in good shape either, and the thought of having to be extremely fit before a hardcore trip daunts me as fuck. It’s a horrible gatekeeper, which some of you will say: no, it’s not, you can do better, anyone can do it. Fuck you.

I know I cannot be that one writer friend who’s obsessed with surfing and is literally spending the next six months in Indonesia testing her luck without a surfing coach because he ditched her for a tournament in Thailand three days after she booked him. She’s written numerous stuff about her near-death experiences while doing extreme sports in nature and described how in those very moments, she’s gotten close to hearing the breaths of the rocks and the mountains basically screaming: you pathetic fuck. I’m happy with admiring her from afar and having small talks about poetry with her every once in a while.

Another author has been spending her residency in the Arctic where artists got to be on a giant ship and learn to be real sailors. She’s been documenting her journey over her blog and there’re some pretty cool snippets: the incident where the crew encountered and almost got eaten by a polar bear that leads to the amusing back stories of the sea shanties trend on social media where a handsome middle-aged man named Maik (the one guy that prompts me I may indeed have daddy issues) sang a sea shanty so heroically he managed to scare the bear away from the dumbfounded crew members. All the good stuff that I enjoyed.

Traveling seems to offer a special kind of wisdom for writers, regardless of the situation, but it’s not something that all of us can do. Physical training is painful and I have a pretty low threshold for pain and it’s one of my biggest fear. I had a stomach cramp once, cried for the entire night, and then told my friend, to which she responded: ever heard of period cramp? I have ma’am. I have. But that isn’t the point.

I remember watching and crying to a YouTube video from the Try Guys channel where one of the personalities of the group, Zach, talked about his experience living with ankylosing spondylitis, a disease that causes your skeletal joints to fuse together and results in unworldly chronic pains for the rest of your life. Forget about the cure, he said, I’d do anything to ease the pain, even if for only a minute. Unconventional pains are the hardest to articulate and expect people to understand, as well as mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.

All thoughts lead to one destined end: if I keep staying in one place, nothing can hurt me. I can work on it, but I don’t know what it will take. I’m growing to be the same as my parents, who’d like to stay rooted in the same land forever till death, which is very unlikely for my generation just so you know. Or maybe this entire post can be summarized in one word: introverted, or worse, you cannot even tell the difference between this post and a therapist’s note.

Anyways, it’s a reality that the world isn’t built for my kind. It’s always spinning. People will be going from one place to the other and be talking about it all the time. Until then I will be burying my head in a stack of documents and learning to be okay with not being anyone’s role model (cringe). In other words, I’d like to believe it takes time.