Katrinka Abroad

I peered into the abyss of tomorrow, and blinked.
Six weeks of solo travel, from Georgia to Armenia to the Balkans—places I'd ached to visit!—would be wasted. After a tough week of family tragedy, I wasn't ready mentally. Maybe spiritually. How could I survive such strange newness? I curled around my backpack on the floor of my room and felt my stomach seesaw in Icarus swoops—elation, dread, elation, panic.
But the backpack was packed, the plane ticket was printed, and everything that could be check-listed was checked off. I would fly to Batumi at dawn.
When the short flight landed, the subtropical air of the Georgian coast hung hazy around the airport. I hailed a cab without any clear sense of what it should cost and tried to breathe away the lingering worry.
The cabbie careened towards the city center with the careless enthusiasm of a career maniac, a trait I later learned to be common among Georgian drivers. I grasped the tired leather seat of the battered Mercedes and tried to respond to small talk in a way that wouldn't make the driver take his eyes off the rutted roads. I didn't know whether he'd overcharged me but I hoped, fervently, that he wouldn't kill me.
And then the blank lands between the airport and the city gave way, and the cab was roaring past the coastline of the Black Sea, past strange art installations on the boardwalk, past defiantly kitschy pastel buildings. I rolled down the window and the humidity of Batumi rushed in, holding me, hugging me.
I felt like a first-time traveler again, high on the fresh flash of new feelings. Palm trees. Sunshine. The strange curve of the Georgian alphabet, passing my peripheral vision as the cab flew down the streets.
The cabbie laughed at my open-mouthed awe. Perhaps he'd seen it before: how his country, his little city, hypnotized his charges. He couldn't know about my previous doubt, my night spent cycling through sine-waves of feeling. But he could see my head leaning dangerously out the open window, my fingers no longer fidgeting in 95-mph induced fear.
As I breathed in Batumi through the window of that crummy old cab, I could barely dream about the adventures that would come in Georgia: losing my way in the beckoning cobblestone streets, seeking cave monasteries in desert mountains, whiling away long hot nights with new friends and jugs of homemade wine. But later that day, as I purged the sweat of self-doubt in the crispness of the Black Sea, I trusted deeply those untethered tomorrows.