When the World is Open Again
I hate to admit that I’m not an adventurous traveler. I love reading about women who travel solo and are spontaneous and brave – Cheryl Strayed, Martha Gellhorn, Beryl Markham – but to my complete chagrin, I’m not one of them. I leave home reluctantly, accompanied by night-before anguish and morning-of convictions of impending doom. I pack too much or too little (oops, no underwear/oops seven pairs of shoes). I’ve tried to get to the root of this anxiety, and all I can figure out is after spending so many years longing for safety and security, I’m convinced I’ll never find my way back whenever I leave home. But after quarantining for most of a year, worrying about whether I was in the grocery too long or if I touched my face after handling a cart, I yearn for life unmediated by television, Twitter, or Instagram. For life outside my neighborhood, my house, my own head.
Someday, I would love to set off with no destination in mind, just a full tank of gas and an old-fashioned paper map. To become a wanderer of American backroads, a pioneer seeing it with new eyes.
I would return to the old graveyards of my family and recite their names like an Ancestry.com rosary: Stackhouse, Shaw, Hawkins, Cassity. Rise up, you ghosts of ordinary men and women who made me, and tell me the life stories you never got to share. I’d go into the desert and drive down long straight highways that are empty all the way to the horizon. I’d try to find a remembered path down to the Pacific in Mendocino where the water is the shimmering, pearly color of abalone shell, where dew-dazzled spider webs cling to a crooked fence, where I suddenly knew “This is a god path.” I would follow the ghost of Kerouac on the road and wish that like Blake, I’d discover my own tree full of angels. Someday, maybe the world will take down the “Closed” sign, and I’ll learn to be a little braver, to venture farther, to leave home fearlessly. Or at least to pack underwear.
Nikki Hardin is a writer of stories, musings, and memories. Her poetry has been published in Riverteeth Journal. She was the founder and publisher of skirt!, a monthly women’s magazine in Charleston, South Carolina. You can reach her at nikki@thedailynikki.com.