a
friend recently sent me an email telling me how unbelievable some of my
travel stories are, and how she suspected that i was making things
up... the best travelblog fake, she was sure! sometimes i can´t help a
wry smile when people email me saying that they´re jealous of the stuff
i´m experiencing over here, and while it´s true that i wouldn´t have my
life any other way right now, i can also assure you that for every
extreme high that i experience, there are also some damned lows to
compensate. this groupmail is a long one, but it´s straight from the
heart, so bear with me.
there are so many advantages to travelling alone: i make
´connections´ with people who i wouldn´t normally meet; people are more
open to inviting me to share their homes, their lives, their
experiences; it´s a lot easier for one person to hitchhike; i have the
liberty to go wherever i want, whenever i want, without having to
accommodate other people´s plans, .. just to name a few. but of course,
this freedom is double-edged: at the end of the day, i´m alone. and
although i concede that ´alone´ doesn´t always equal ´lonely´, you´d be
incredibly naive if you didn´t admit that there was a link. at
best, after a particularly good day, you send an email with a faulty
description of an amazing encounter with some person who left you on a
high, or you take a photo which only captures 3% of the beauty which
left you breathless. at worst, after a particularly bad day where all
you need is physical human contact, you convince/content yourself
saying ´i know i have loved ones out there who would give me a hug if
they knew how shit i felt,´ and try and ignore the voice that adds
spitefully ´even if the closest one is still 1000km away!´
i´ve long since accepted that if i want to continue travelling
this way (ie, not just for ´holidays´, but working and travelling at
the same time), i´m limiting myself on the sentimental field. although
i had a lot of fun as a young filly and have absolutely no regrets,
it´s pretty much the case now where if i want something serious, the
guy (or girl, let´s not limit myself even further ;) has to be a
like-minded traveller as well. for the last couple of months, i was
with one such person, and even though there were some obvious
incompatibilities, it was great to be able to share experiences
directly with someone without resorting to composing an email. so when
that ended a couple of days ago, i was naturally down. on top of that,
i´d just changed lodging arrangements, and was sleeping on the floor in
the house of an eccentric 58yo guy who i´d met the previous week.
as much as i´ve come to appreciate this guy, Arturo, there´s no
way to dress up the state of his 3-room hovel (bedroom, kitchen,
bathroom). his living quarters are straight out of a movie (think the
old guy in Amores Perros who took in the injured fighting dog) : fruit-
and onion-peels rotting on the bench and table, old cobwebs floating
off the walls and covering shelves, eggshells and other rubbish
festering on the floor, grime on the floor everywhere in the house,
snails on the wet floor and walls of the bathroom... absolutely
filthy. but absolutely exhausted, emotionally, physically, mentally,
and having no other choice for the night (it was already close to
midnight) i gingerly put my pack down on the least mouldy surface,
stretched my sleeping bag out on a somewhat damp mattress, and went to
sleep.
when i woke up the next day, the weight of a failed romance
and pathetic self-pitying thoughts of ´who would ever accept/share
your lifestyle´ came crashing down on me. the thought that the closest
person i had to comfort me was this bum, who obviously lived in a world
of his own, was enough to bring tears to my eyes, and feeling so
completely and desperately alone, i escaped to the (dubious) comfort of
cyberspace. reading and replying to emails, and chatting to 2 friends
on msn (te debo nico, de verdad te quiero, and dave, honestly, thank
you, not just for yesterday but also for everything since santiago last
year - your maturity and friendship is inspiring) made me realise that
i *wasn´t* as alone as i felt.
feeling much better, i went ´home´ and there, i realised what a
completely self-absorbed pussy i´d been. whereas my ´alone-ness´ is
self-imposed by my choice of lifestyle, there are so many people,
especially in their latter years who live in social isolation. i´m not
going to paint Arturo as a saint: he´s unemployed (and hence very
little money), peevish, has strong opinions about everything, 2
daughters my age who are ashamed of him, and family who doesn´t want
anything to do with him, because he´s a cantankerous old fart (his
words, not mine, although i wholeheartedly agree). he´s intelligent and
lucid, albeit eccentric, worked as an argentine consul, speaks
impressive english and french, likes monty python, prefers tea to
coffee, and likes zabaglione-flavoured ice cream. (hey! one´s never too
depressed to share a love of ice cream!) he´s grumpy, but has a quirky
sense of humour, and it´s a delight to see him explode with
laughter when something tickles his funnybone (eg, HIM - ever seen the
movie ´7 years under a doormat´? ME - no...you don´t mean ´7 years in
Tibet´, do you? HIM - no, no, ´a year under a doormat´ ME - i thought
you said 7 years? HIM - what, one year under a doormat isn´t enough for
you?). and he´s alone.
we live in a mad mad world where a 24yo girl from the ´right side
of the tracks´ in a nice developed country can strike up a friendship
with a 58yo ´bum´ living in slum conditions on the other side of the
world. i feel so completely ashamed that i judged him as a person just
because of the state of his living quarters, that i dismissed him as a
potential friend just because i thought he was strange. mind you, i
still think he´s different, but that doesn´t mean he can´t be a friend
(and besides, who am i to talk, i´m not exactly the picture of normalcy
either)...
i don´t really know where i´m going anymore with this anecdote, but the aim of this email was just to tell you all that:
1) every time one of you writes to me, it´s a lot more important
than you think. if you don´t write because you´re busy, i can
understand. but if you don´t write because you think you have nothing
exciting to write about, pull your finger out, and click ´compose new
message´, for f$ck´s sake!
2) we all have stories, and are worth knowing. little kids will
always have someone going gaga over them, and young people have
their youth and beauty to attract friends, but old people and ´bums´
are dismissed as not worthwhile. in the same way that an email is
probably a lot more important to me than you think, a smile and a few
words are probably a lot more important to others than you might
imagine...
enough moralising, í´m cold and wanna go home. ´til next time.
