Intergalactic, Antarctic
I had to stop reading a space book this morning because my year nine decision to become an astronaut and be the first woman to walk on Mars came flooding back in one vivid and overwhelming waterless sea of enthusiasm.
I had to stop because somewhere you have to draw the line. Don’t you?
Johnny Cash certainly thought so.
That’s the thing about travel. Your parents always tell you that you need to go travelling to “get it out of your system” just like they tell you to “get a degree under your belt” which are the two most contradictory statements you can tell a child. Or an adult. Or anyone for that matter.
Because travel does nothing but get further and further into your system, which means you never want to get that degree under your belt because all you want to do is travel. And the more you travel the more places you think of to go. And even if you had the degree under your belt, who cares? You’re in Jamaica on perpetual holidays anyway.
Anyhow, I feel like not even plans to venture into deepest darkest West Africa in a few months are enough, no, space. It must be space. Even though I don’t understand physics, maybe I’ll get that 24 years of study that my parents have been talking about under my belt to become an astronaut then head on an intergalactic holiday to get travel out of my system.
But now I’m thinking about Antarctica too. I remember when I was 14 going to a writers workshop where the author giving the talk had been to Antarctica to write about it and it was right there and then that I decided to become a writer. He described it as so strange because you couldn’t tell how big everything was because it was all just white, so the size of one thing against another could not be compared.
I wanted that.
So here I am, struggling for cash on a beach in Mozambique, somewhere into a grand mess of a journalism degree, dreaming about a completely white holiday from my completely tropical holiday.
So this is why I am thinking about drawing the line somewhere. I want to write a massive list of everything I want to do but I think I might be writing for the rest of my life and never do any of it because I’m too busy writing the list.
And just to make things more confusing, I’ve actually been homesick the last few days.
Oh God.
When will it end?
Never, I’m sure of it.