August & Everything After

...which is, in fact, the title of a Counting Crows album, and so I've marked myself as unoriginal.

I am officially unemployed as of Friday. For my entire adult life, I've been employed/employable/an employee; the revelation of unemployment hangs over my head like a skewed tiara on a doll: It shines, appears important, and is expensive. Liberating is not the word for it, although I suppose it to be the most accurate descriptor. At the moment, it's difficult not to feel like a bum, a burden, not a contributor but a walking rucksack, an empty stomach wandering about from meal to meal.

My budget for each month of this two-month excursion is around $400 US. What that might amount to in Euros, I've no idea. I lack direction upon arrival in Lisboa. Brandon can't make a ferry off the island (Madeira) until Saturday, so I am muito sozinha em Lisboa for two to three days. This will give me a chance, I hope, to experience the other side of CouchSurfing: This time I will be a surfer rather than the host. The only problems remaining may be navigation, the language barrier, and finding a string of pay phones by which to contact Brandon.

I worry. Rather, the residual parts of me accustomed to structure, to planning and itinerary, are worried. I grew up traveling as the head of a ragtag convoy, my family racing hand-in-hand across airports and bus terminals around the world, a chain of paper dolls, oldest to youngest, our suitcases numbered off digits 1-8: 1. My father, 2. My mother, everything following attached to a kid. Now, I have a giant, ugly blue packframe, crammed to its tattering gills with clothing, notebooks and Handi-Wipes. Two flashlights, a Ziploc full of dryer sheets (helpful as fire starters should I need them), several soft sweaters, a package of Orbitz Bubblemint gum. A picture of my family. Several memories of John. Extra socks. I count the hours until the plane lifts off. I count the hours until I return home.

A myriad of other adventurers, predecessors and colleagues alike, tell and have told me that this can be done. That one can wander the world alone surviving on nothing but the occasional hearty meal at the invitation of strangers, on air and water and the hard ground under a sleeping bag. In August, two months from departure, I still didn't believe I'd purchased a plane ticket, decided to quit my job, or that I would relish the idea of traipsing a foreign city, attempting to make my way on a rudimentary knowledge of its layout and language. The years I've spent clawing through things: bad relationships, too much snow atop my aging car, my own fear, books and books and books on the way to a degree, are all falling away now, and the openness of it all reminds me of when we were kids playing outside after a blizzard, one of those dumps of snow that piles up in feet, not inches, grazes the rooftops, buries the yard:

One tree, hidden in the woods past our front yard, bent over with the weight of snow and its own age, makes a perfect arch, eight, maybe ten feet over a pristine patch. We struggle into snowsuits, pull on mittens (the kind with strings through our sleeves, the ones Mom can't believe we lose anyway), force feet into boots. We are going to scale that tree. We are climbing to the top if it's the last thing we do.

We each shimmy up, padded knees clinging, until we can sit with our legs hanging over the trunk, feet dangling. My brothers are the reckless first: They stand up slowly, balancing on the curved-most part of the arch, then flail out into the cold air, arms tucked by their sides, eyes slammed shut. I wait in the space between their disappearance and my own hesitation, then do the same. The air rushes by. It's strangely warm- perhaps the friction between my body and its chilly surfaces becomes a kind of warmth, and then the air itself is gone, replaced by the soft crump of my body hitting snow, and though I've held my breath the whole way down, I suddenly realize that I can breathe, and the air I've passed through becomes crystalline, saturated with the taste of bark, dry and fresh at the same time. I can hear my brothers, and my sister laughing, but most of all I hear everything living in the woods all at once: a woodpecker landed several trees away, ice melting into a bucket beside the house, and breathable air is indistinguishable from cold, solid snow, and I am not afraid to drown here.

Time moves forward. I remember now how, two weeks ago, I kissed a man with a mouth like the sea and left him to catch his own plane. In three days I'll catch mine. I may be sleepless, jobless, homeless, but it all rises up around me now and I am not afraid.