Week 2 with Dakota

“What you came to find isn’t here. What was yours is gone.”

-Cinema Paradiso

Leaving Florida

I’d written somewhere in my notebook that I’d leave on July 15th.

I left exactly a month after. I was waiting on courage that wasn’t coming, on perfect timing that was magically going to manifest itself and call me to the road. I had a very romantic notion of my departure. It was going to be something wild and unplanned, and entirely alone.

In the past few weeks, I’d become desperate to leave. For one, the political tension in the area was rising more than I had ever seen it before. They were growing rallies for Trump. I’d see his flag waving on the shore, on passing boats, on bridges and trucks. It was becoming obsessive, suffocating even. And almost parallel to this was the insistent, obsessive maintenance that the people in my area were determined to carry on, even at the height of the pandemic. Each morning, I’d wake to the sound of mowing and trimming and remodeling. It was every day, every hour, every place. I’d even hear it from the shore sometimes. There was something so artificial and oppressive about this manic drive for interior and exterior perfection. I wanted to see a tree branch leaning over the road, untamed acres of uncut grass and dandelions, a house with chipping paint or a loose hinge, something broken and imperfect. And I thought, If I spend any more time here, I’ll go crazy.

But I didn’t know how I could possibly leave. The van was still making a regular appearance at the mechanic, still shutting down when it felt like it and nobody seemed keen on fixing it. One of the doors wouldn’t open, then it became two. Then they fixed one, and another stopped opening. As soon as I’d fix one thing, something else would need repairing. It was endless; it still is endless. But it gave me four days on the road, and I know it could have given me more if I’d asked it to.

So I did it, I left after all, and it happened just as impulsively as every other part of my life has happened. I had just got the van back on Friday, no better than when I’d dropped it off that morning, and on the drive back home, I decided that was it, I was leaving with or without a reliable car.

I spent the weekend packing, bringing everything I had into the van. Before the virus, I had been living in Scotland and had to move back to Florida suddenly. I had so many things I had to pack, but I knew that once I got to Virginia, I was going to have to begin another life without this burden. I was going to return everything to my childhood room, and start over in an empty van. It was just the way I wanted it to be. I was simply carrying too much every time I traveled and moved. And it was more than just clothes and books, it was piles and piles of the past that I had to let go of. It was years of memories, painful and beautiful, that had to find a permanent home so that I could travel these roads and know who I was without my past. All these years, I’d been running from memories that came along with me in all the things I insisted on carrying everywhere.

On the Road

It was messy, so brutal and lonely and foolish of me to think it would have been anything near what I’d imagined it to be. I was stunned by the part that I hadn’t anticipated, the part where I remember, everything. And for the hundredth time, I learned again that there was a difference between travel and escape. But what if escape is necessary, and travel is a thing that is learned, after the escape is final and complete?

There was a severance that had to happen, a dependency I had to break, a departure I had to perform, whether I was prepared or not. I was eager to find her, the little girl in me I’d abandoned. In the past few years, I had become foreign to myself. The roads, once a dear friend, had now become strange and menacing. I was terrified, though travel had hardly terrified me before. I hadn’t felt this alone in years. The solitude was total and untouched. It was mine, and I didn’t want it, though I once used to desire it badly.

It was confusing. I finally had the van I’d dreamed I’d have someday, doing what I always wanted to do, years earlier than I’d anticipated, and yet, all I wanted was to turn around and forget all about leaving. Sure, Florida was hell, but it was familiar, comfortable even.

I realized I’d forgotten how to be alone. And in the next four days, I was going to learn it all over again: the art of solitude, an art I’d missed and was, at once, completely uncertain I could return to.

I’d abandoned who I was, and I wasn’t entirely sure that I’d find her again. I was ready to apologize, to myself, for the pain I’d inflicted and sought after because I thought myself deserving of only that, more and more pain.

I felt shame, too, for returning north without much to show for the years gone by. I knew I’d be asked what I’d done, what my plans were, and how was I possibly going to answer? I knew just as much of tomorrow as I knew of myself, which was not much. Every morning, I struggled to make sense of the day, but sometime around noon, I’d abandon that meaningless effort and embrace the day for what it was, which was a day given to me that could have not been given. It was with and without meaning, baring purpose, and baring nothing at all. It made sense, and it didn’t.

Overnight in Knoxville, Tennessee

I was a girl in a white van, driving a highway to someplace where no one knew me. I was once a writer and now unsure of what I was. I was losing sense of who I am at a time when I had far less energy and hope to start over.

Tennessee

Something happened in Tennessee. I am not sure what it was, only that almost as soon as I crossed the border, something shifted in me. First, it was a sure cut from Florida, a confirmation that I’d gone far enough, and that after all this talk of leaving, I finally did it. And it was painful for all the reasons I haven’t written about yet. One day, I will, when I am ready. But what mattered to me then, more than the reason behind my pain was figuring a way out of it. And somewhere between Chattanooga and Nashville, I realized that if I had any chance of clawing my way out of this grief, I was going to have to focus on the road out rather than on what was being left behind. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to fill this void inside me, but I had to figure out a way to forget what once filled its place.

I thought of filmmaking, which I’d begun for the first time in my life earlier this year. I was yearning for purpose at a time when I was slowly beginning to understand that I wasn’t going to find it on the road. Walt Whitman, too, understood that travel, without art, was not enough to live by. It would have to be the road and… Travel was a way towards something. I understood that it could no longer satisfy me the way it used to. There was real work that had to be done, and I couldn’t keep avoiding it.

And it was only then, in this realization, that I understood that neither escape nor travel mattered. It was the outcomes of them both that made it worthwhile.

Coming Home

My diary from 2003

If the road was a trail of painful memories, then home was a cell that held the harshest of them all. But by the time I reached Virginia, I was prepared for the more that was to come. I was not stunned by the pain this time. I entered my old room knowing it was there, and that I would have to sit with it, alone. I watched the past play before me in everything I held, and I couldn’t help but compare the dreams I had then to the outcome I was returning with now. The truth is, the past was the thing killing me slowly. It was also the thing I couldn’t let go of. I was overwhelmed by feelings of failure. I had imagined a very different return from this one. In fact, I had imagined it to happen much later too. I did not think that once I had left I’d ever feel the urge to return. How could you willingly return to a place you’d only dreamed of having the freedom to leave?

And perhaps that’s where I failed, in planning only my leaving, and nothing for the time after. It must be how I always ended up back at these places.

***

In a few weeks, I turn 25. It terrifies me, and I don’t feel that I am ready. I could keep running, I could plan to leave again in my van, or I could anchor myself to a place until I figure out what it is, truly, that I want to do, so that when the next year comes around, and I am facing the next age, I’ll be ready. I still have the time to change, but there may come a time in my life when I can’t say that. I need to figure out what about my art scares me, and to face it.

I could keep traveling on impulse each time that nagging feeling returns, or I could surrender to it and find a more permanent remedy in the work I am meant to produce.

The two most important days of your life are the day you were born, and the day you discover why.

-Marc Twain