Weekender

Over and over in my head I am quietening my scream for adventure. The child tugging on my legs while I'm liaising with suppliers, chasing stock, making international phonecalls. I am stroking its head and saying 'just a few more months' but the sobs and cries grow so loud at times that I can't drown them out.  I play scenes of jungle hopping (like those long hot days I spent travelling through Vietnam and Cambodia), gorge scrambling, fruit picking, motorcycle riding, volunteering, jet skiing, living from a backpack and the contents of our car. Reading maps, taking lunch stops. Brazil, Nervada, Miami, Chiang Mai, Ha Long Bay, Singapore, Jamacia. I count days and months until we'll fly out with a one way ticket for a year or two really living. 

I am strong and resilient in the palms of other lands, ittinaries, finding food, shelter, fixing wounds, trecking, using my gut instinct. But I am reminded each day how my fears bubble inside me of Cutipol, D&D, Kate Spde. Ironically, these are the things that matter so little, but they are what restrain me to my chair for now. Shackles and weights in the corner of that room, remembering one thing to the next, chasing in advance and double checking invoices. How can it be that you love and loathe something with such passion at once? 

With comfort, I stumble across an extract from Georgia O'Keefe (why she has always stayed with me since high school, I will never know). It seems like it found me at the right time, when I am so terrified about something so irrational I wonder whether this is normal. In so many adult situation I am out of my depth, but here I am running this home; with a mortgage and bills, a full time job, cooking each night, cleaning each week, hosting dinner and barbecues and above it all, still thinking it strange how I control my own bed time, but still we walk ourselves up at ten every day. 

If my twelve year old self knew that, I'm not sure what she'd think. Am I really an adult, or am I just pretending? Maybe everyone is. Perhaps no one really knows what they're doing. And even though one day I won't be asked for ID to buy the Prosecco that fills our fridge, I won't stumble on the phone when making doctors appointments or ringing the electricity company or renewing my insurance. Maybe even then, I still won't have anything figured out. And I might even have that insatiable wanderlust still burning inside. 










 

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