I Am Herefeatured

At some point in the past ten years, I started repeating this mantra anytime I’m traveling.

When I’m standing in front of something new or beautiful, something significant, something that takes my breath away, something I want to remember, I stop. I stop walking, I stop staring at my phone or at the settings on my camera. I just stop in my tracks. I listen, I look, I smell, I breathe and I repeat: I am here.

I commit each detail to memory — the color of the sky, the smell of the trees or a street cart cooking up something delicious, the sound of traffic or waves lapping up against the shore or of total and utter nothingness. I force myself into the present. It is so hard for someone like me, who lives life recalling back or thinking forward, but rarely in the moment as it happens, which is why it’s become so important to me.

Five seconds, maybe ten. I am fully present. I am here.

These memories sit in the recesses of my mind, waiting to be sparked by a sound or a smell or *something* that takes me back. Now, these memories serve as my escape — that for a minute, I can close my eyes, take a deep breath and I’m suddenly transported back to that beach I love so much in Curaçao, where the sky turns into a watercolor painting at dusk. Or maybe I’m riding around in a vintage car through the streets of Havana with the windows down, the breeze offering the greatest relief from the humid air. I could be in Paris, eating a crepe on the Champs de Mars, in Athens catching my breath after the hike up to the Acropolis, strolling the boardwalk in Seaside or feeding an elephant in Singapore. They are extraordinary moments in an otherwise ordinary life and they give me a comfort that nothing else can in moments like these, where life could not feel more uncertain and out of my own control.

I don’t know when it’ll be safe to travel again and I can add new memories to my mental scrapbook. It’s been a really hard pill for me to swallow — I plan my year out sometimes years in advance. I flag my calendar with the next destination to look forward to as a means to get through. I’m finding new ways of passing the time and coping — instead of planning for what should have been a two and a half week trek across the Mediterranean, I’ve bought an obscene amount of tie dye and spent the entire weekend making a very colorful new wardrobe. Instead of making Google maps with places to go, I’m going on long walks. Instead of watching YouTube videos of places I’ll be visiting, I’m watching videos of places I’ve been, wrapping myself in a cocoon of memories.

In many ways, I feel like I’m back to where I was ten years ago — uncertain and unsure about the future, trying to find something that sparks joy to make the days feel less ordinary. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve taken up shelter at Mom’s house with Stephanie — when the shelter in place order went into effect in Illinois, it felt like a better idea to head a half hour north to Mom’s, where there’s plenty more space to move around than my cozy little shoebox apartment downtown and where I didn’t need to share so much space with the hundreds of other people who call the same 40-story building home. So now, my little home in the city has (for the time being) been relegated to existing as the world’s most expensive storage unit and I spend my days working from my childhood bedroom and my nights tie dying, crafting, watching YouTube videos and going for joy rides with Stephanie (with the windows down and Free Bird on full blast, naturally). I’d like to write more — I still have an entire Asia trip to share with all of you (…and Colorado, Germany, Kansas City, Spain and Morocco, Italy…the backlog is endless. I know. It’s terrible. Don’t hate me — if I could toss my writers block out a window, it’d already be a splatter of jumbled words on the pavement).

I can’t plan anything — it feels too soon to think ahead. And it’s hard to complain about not knowing when I can go on vacation again because my priority is not getting sick and not getting anyone else sick (though I suspect there’s a possibility I already had the virus — I was incredibly sick with what I thought was the flu about a week after I got home from Italy in January, and I never get the flu). I have my family, I have my job (a great blessing — the virus and its impact have hit my industry incredibly hard and a number of my friends and colleagues are now without work). I have a lot of questions, more hopes and even bigger dreams, but no answers.

And I have my memories. Those five, ten second blocks of time that I can recall at will the second I close my eyes, of the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met and the hope that someday soon, I’ll refill that bank with brand new memories.