d r i f t w o o d

Driftwood ☽ Chapter Four

❛❛You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think it counts as love.❜❜

-THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER

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driftwood ☽ chapter four

          I cannot quite explain the feeling of wanting to travel so much. The overwhelming need to just escape and be so many different things in one lifetime. To run away with a friend, and experience new culture, eat strange food, take many pictures.

          It's quite hard to explain a concept that can be interpreted in so many ways, almost like trying to describe the meaning of life. It's very hard and I only understand that I have never been settled, and I had always felt as though traveling was something I was meant to do forever. It was a way for me to experience culture and diversity, and so many different lives. I wish I could tell of how I went to India once and was mesmerized by all the elephants and gods and food. I wish I could say I visited China and everyone looked like they knew one another and the cities were awake with the sound of city dwellers. Or flew to Africa to see the lions, and dust and dirt.

          But that wasn't true. 

          I wish I could say that, because maybe you would understand: the world has created a stereotypical view where one place defines an entire group of people and their behavior.  All those things-while being true-are a mere concept of society. When I went to India, it felt as though I had landed in any other place. The noise was the same, the people were still people. It was all the same, except in a different place. I could fee the difference in the air, and I could see it as well. But it was a the kind of different that felt the same as everything else. China was beautiful. When you go there, you don't find yourself worrying so much about the pollution to remember it when you arrive. You just step out, breathe in, and enjoy the sight. It doesn't bother you, and it's not long until you realize that it shouldn't. And the sound of Africa was  nothing like any other place. Africa sounded like creation, the very place where it all began, with big cities and beautiful people but so much land to just admire.

          Wanderlust, I suppose, is for the people who are open minded. You can't be rooted into one idea, or one place, and then expect to go somewhere and just...enjoy. It hinders your ability to just breathe and relax. I always liked to think that that's why it worked for me so well. I always craved to be in more than one place at a time. I always wanted to experience culture, people, food, festivals. It was never a crime to compare a place to another once in a while, but I tried not to associate anything with anything else at all. It kept things simple. And I was comfortable with that.

          Festivals were almost always my favorite aspect of the journey: Hot Air Balloon Festivals, Summer Festivals, Color Fests. I had a whole checklist of them in my mind, and I was itching to tick them off. They were always so vibrant, so loud, so colorful. A kaleidoscope of people and emotions mixed together. It was times like those when I felt like my heart was made of air, like I could forget what I was and just look up at the streams of iridescent lights and float away with them. Drift off into the sky and never come back.

          Of course, it always had to end. You always had to leave at some point and realize that you had a life to get straight: you had a job,  or kids, or college. And then all of a sudden you were back to a reality you had come to escape. I always found it hard to leave. To transition after the joy. It was always as difficult as leaving people you had grown to adore, to admire. But I suppose that was only me.