Traveling the Break Up Terrain

It may seem strange to read a break up concerto on a travel blog, but I have come to an understanding lately. Breaking up is incredibly similar to traveling. And traveling always has a soundtrack :)

You think you know a town. It is a town you fell in love with once. And you love the restaurants and the dancing and the adventure that the city brings. You love the urban design, the freedom it allows you to explore grit and refreshment, sometimes at the same time. The bookstores have new, undiscovered titles and you blossom in new discoveries about yourself, your interests, your capabilities. You explored the tunnels, and though you could never quite manage to navigate the labyrinthine, underground structure, you remember the human handprints on the crumbling, frescoed walls. And then, suddenly, but not quite suddenly because you know that there must be time for murals to decay, it seems unfamiliar because someone else begins to talk about the town with an alternative perspective of its enchantments.  “Sure the town is beautiful, but it really holds no interest for me. Try as I might, and I tried my hardest, I just can’t see it.”

And you return to find that the stores have all changed places or at least they all seem to have different signs.  Someone has painted them with a different brush. You distrust your own experience of the space, and you no longer understand the language, and no amount of hand gestures and guttural sounds will help those living there understand you.  And with this lack of an ability to communicate, you feel lost.

Now, a traveler knows that you always get lost. An Experienced Traveler will trust the getting lost, will sit in the getting lost because being lost is always the best way to see things differently and to find new insight.  Being lost is the panic you overcome. Being lost is the resourcefulness you find again in yourself. Being lost is the reaching out to people, the locals who know the landscape of the geography you are traversing and who want you to find your way home. Being lost is remembering your own internal guide, and you recognize that she has never lost you, though you may have lost your way because you ignored her for a little while.

So you walk this locale as it appears to you now. And you wander through alleys of regret, and unfamiliar streets cast in shadows you have always feared, and you meet unsavory people that you have passed time and time again but you don’t know yet how to bypass them.  And you keep walking past the same street post knowing that it isn’t the right one. But there is something, something in that street post you are compelled to walk by again and again and again, searching for come clue that will explain why you are lost and where the wrong turn came from. You turn your head from one side to the other and nothing seems familiar. And you finally get tired of the walking around in circles.

And then you see something. The fever of panic and anxiety breaks. It’s a familiar window, a red door you recognize from long ago, and you guess, I think this must be the right way. You doubt yourself and take a few wrong turns and need to ask for help again. And then you find the little poster you remarked on earlier to yourself, that poster that only you noticed and which made you laugh internally, lit you up from the inside with joy, and you begin to take up longer strides. And you get a little more confident about walking through those streets because you know they will eventually lead to something else you recognize, something else you know absolutely is in the right direction. And then you come upon the bridge, the sidewalk that feels wonderfully, peacefully, assuredly your own, and you walk with the lightness of one who is going home, one who is sure that there will be safety and comfort and a trustworthy witness if you can just keep the stamina to get through the few miles you know are ahead of you.  

On this last trip to Mexico, I bought a Catrina. I sought her out for weeks, looking at hundreds in window shops and street vendor stalls and museum exhibits. I almost bought one because it was the best I had seen so far and I was getting close to the end of my trip, but something about her didn’t fit for me, and I resolved to keep looking, knowing full well that I may not find the one Catrina that called out to me.

And, in Mexico City, I finally found her and I was so glad to have not settled for others. I wrapped her in bubble plastic and packed her in soft clothing, and I made sure to keep her by my side in the airport so that she would not be broken. At my gate, I set the bag that she resided in on the floor, and I heard a crack. My stomach vacuumed out. I thought, "I tried so hard to protect this low-fired clay woman from breaking and she is shattered now." I was heartbroken. I did not have time to unwrap her before getting on the plane, so I did not know of her state for about seven hours. On take off, that lifting from the ground into the realm of possibilities and dreams, that freedom of celestial flight sought by Da Vinci’s genius, I thought about the purpose of the Catrina. She is a skeletal woman dressed in the bourgeois clothing of the colonial Spanish señora. She is a reminder that nothing lasts. Whichever masks we put on, whatever we use to elaborate ourselves, death comes for everything living. I made my peace that should she be broken when I saw her again upon landing, then the breakage would be a perfect accoutrement. I would accept her as a reminder that, for better or worse, nothing lasts as we imagine it might.

When I got home, I unwrapped her from her false vestiges of safety.  I unfolded the dresses I roamed Monte Alban and Teotihuacan in from around her frame, nervously, because I recognized that my intellectualizations of her swift damage were like gossamer threads to salve my emotions about reality.  I waited to see what I might find.

She was perfectly intact. She was as beautiful as when I first saw her, first fell in love with her, first knew that she was the one for me to take home. She is part of my goddess altar now, and she stands looking at me when I sleep.

She is me.

Breaking up is a lot like traveling. Always the way home is to trust your intuition, ask for help, and live in the mystery, the ambiguity. Accept the breakage. And know that you are always, eternally, and forever whole.