The Travel Within

You're looking out the large bus windows and watching the most trees you have ever seen in your lifetime pass by with a vicious speed on your way to Washington D.C. This trip is the farthest, and by far one of the most interesting places, you have ever visited since your transfer from the comfort of that California home just a couple of weeks ago for university.

It isn't even about the way you choke up at those war memorials you pass by. The sheen of various marble structures squeezing your head straight and bowed like a statue of a nun. You know this is all those people at home. This is all of the people stationed in San Diego, this is all your friends in bootcamp, this is the future and the past and the present, and everything rolled into one black slab of slanted rock at the Vietnam memorial. This isn't even about the memorials that, at their sheer stature, make your chest clench from pure emotion over the significance of their vast construction.

This is about that one moment in front of the Lincoln Memorial. As you sit, the contact of your thighs with the marble making your rain soaked jeans drop to freezing and the slow drip of water down your neck. A stab of jealously over the couple kissing in the drizzle, standing right in front of the large reflecting pool’s broken surface like a distorted projection of the passing seconds. Your shirt sticking to your back from all the rain and sweat. And you think to yourself,

"This is one of the greatest nights of my life."

And you contemplate about that statement for awhile. Mull it over. Quietly spinning it around and around again in your head. This is a new you, after that split second of transformative awe, sliding and pitching you forward to the future.

All those snippets of time spent slowly crawling to this hour, minute, second all add up to this beautiful feeling you will remember in the future with an ache that makes you human. You will give fewer details about the trip as time passes (right now you remember going to a hookah bar and walking past the White House), but eventually it will all boil down to the funny little squeeze you felt in your chest when you first looked out over the reflecting pool in Washington D.C. That is your moment of travel. That will be the essence of what makes you never forget this memory.

You snap back to focus and let those thoughts go after awhile because it is one the greatest f***ing moments of your life and the cab's here.

The cab's here and it's completely over.