By Emma Wille (Suka StreetArt)

After three years of travel, I have found myself temporarily marooned in the Phoenician desert. Back home to a land that now feels foreign and strange. Trying to fit back into a box that now feels too tight. I often wake up surprised and confused. You see, I have read that traveling ruins you. By that, people mean to say that once you start traveling, it’s hard to go back, wherever that means. Usually by going “back” they mean going back home. Back to a steady job, to a committed relationship, to a lifestyle seen as stable and successful. Back to a linear, staircase of accomplishments. But I think “back” should really be called “before.” Because when you leave to travel there is a break. A ripple in the trajectory of marching forward in time. I agree, traveling does ruin you. Because once you are off track, there is no going back. You bit the apple. You swallowed the blue pill. You opened the box. And thank god for that.

I used to play the game of Life with my sister growing up. I remember that mostly your odds were determined by a crappy, plastic spinner. You had lots of choices, and possibilities. But in the end, there were only two places to go. Two retirement homes, at the end of the board. Sure, the number of little plastic blue and pink children differed in the back of your car. Your income, career, and assets were all liable to change. They threw in some natural disasters and tragedies along the way to keep things interesting. But overall, the board was pretty limited. Just a cardboard path that you followed, dictated by a an omniscient wheel of chance. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that board was a lie. There are many other paths to take. Off of the board. We don’t live our lives in turns of numbers. “Congratulations! You got a six. You can really move ahead.” Because that would mean a race to the end. And what then? Do you really win if you get there first? If you die with the most money?  

I think traveling ruins you because it shows you the limits of time. When you stay in a country for one year, you know that everything has an expiration date. It’s a countdown to the end. Your friendships, your relationships, your job, your housing. All of it is temporary. So you don’t waste any of it. Sure, there are days that you hide inside catching up on the second season of Narcos. We all need the luxury of breaking from reality once in a while. But when you are out there, you are really there. Fully present. You value every second with the people around you, because you know it will end. So you make lists. You try and see everything you can.

Your schedule becomes a sacred space. The blanks are precious commodities, yours to fill. Moments crystallize into coveted memories….like a sieve separating gold from the riverbank. Drinking coffee with my German friend in Palermo. Watching people walk by with their little dogs. Seeing an elderly couple stop and kiss under the Jacaranda trees. Sipping beer on my terrace at sunset. Listening to my lovely friend play his violin at breakfast on the patio, while bathing in the sun and drinking bitter mate. Dancing with my partner on our wooden floors, sliding in our socks, under the peeling paint of the home we shared. At the top of a mountain in Ecuador, watching the clouds roll in, sketching a picture I would later give away. We hold onto scraps of material to remember. The physical grounding us, representing something “real.” A tangible connection to these vivid moments. But even if I go back, nothing would be quite the same. My first love had a term he coined “future nostalgia.” When you experience a moment knowing that you will remember it with bittersweet pain. This is traveling. It is a constant state of missing. Missing places and people. But what an honor, to have beautiful things to miss.

And so the countdown begins again. As the grains of sand start to diminish, the faster they fall. I’m sure there is a physics explanation for this terrifying phenomenon. All I know is I end up clutching at grains of sand that slip through my fingers. But I know, their value is directly related to their temporal state. If the sand was mine forever maybe I would put it in a jar, and promptly forget it on my bookshelf.  

But the funny thing is, all friendships, relationships, and jobs are temporary. But maybe their end is not so clearly on the horizon. You don’t actually need to start traveling to become painfully aware of this reality. To become present. You can choose to open your eyes to the hourglass.

I like to think that we rent. We rent our bodies and our families. We use them on borrowed time… So I have decided to become a time traveler. For time is a strange thing. Every moment you have lived, and will live are all happening simultaneously, right now. Right now you are being born. Right now you are dying. Right now you are falling in love. Right now your heart is breaking. But all we can see is this. Nothing really ends, just disappears from view. I like to visualize time as a tapestry. Moments as threads. They all exist on the loom, even if all we can see is the moment before us. And somehow this thought gives me comfort. Why be sad for a moment when it never really ends, just exists on a plane outside of our narrow vision?

And we can all live as time travelers, remembering that the moments are counting down. That everything is both temporary and eternal. As I read this, we’ve already lost 5 minutes. But they aren’t actually gone, just existing elsewhere, adding to that gorgeous tapestry we are weaving that is life.