If you were given an ultimatum to choose between your relationship or your passion, what would you choose? If you left that choice up to chance, would your life have the same outcome? Would making that choice mean freedom or regret?
It was a surprise to find myself in this predicament. Somewhere along the journey of my life, my heart had begun to betray my brain. Or perhaps the opposite. Was I leading myself to the end of the road, where a choice would determine the rest of my life? They say when one door closes, another opens. Sometimes opening the door is the most difficult thing in the world. I would have to make a choice between salvaging my relationship of 8 long years or choosing a life of travel. In the end, I would betray someone. Would it ever be logical to betray myself?
There are many different types of personality in this world. Some of us yearn to travel. But there are others who don’t. Though they enjoy a holiday and are happy to indulge in the occasional vacation, they don’t share that same longing, overwhelming craving for travel that is etched deep inside our souls. We dream of places we’ve never been. Picturing our fingers stretched out on pristine white sand beaches. Our footsteps stomping unbeaten paths across mountains and through streams. Our eyes glittering in the vibrant lights of cities. our minds a constant carousel of thought. Some of us are like water; our world’s like the rapid flow of a river. Ever changing and evolving. Gaining memories like gatherings of silt and carving paths through our lives like ice through rock. Others are like the Earth. Like the trees themselves, planted firmly in their origins. Looking out across the expansive landscape with curiosity, but safe and content within their confined world.
I had made the decision to move to Paris. To discover the enchanting delights of a place famous for its romance, it’s elegance, its je nes sais quois. To live like a local. Soak up yet another culture and understand a part of the world that was as yet still beyond my recognition. Strange it seemed that I was being pulled away from a love affair with a person to a love affair with a city.
My boyfriend told me multiple times already that he would not be joining me in Paris. Something in my brain ticked over. As if going through the motions. I knew how this would go, we had done the long distance thing before. Three times now had I left, my constant fear of inertia willing me into the unknown. To discover new pastures, new languages, constantly in search of a new story to live, and then to tell. Three times I had promised I was back for good, that I wouldn’t leave again. Yet here I was doing just that. In my heart, I finally knew I couldn’t promise that this time I would stay. Slowly, but surely we find out who we really are. What we’re willing to believe of ourselves and others. My heart knew what I wanted, knew what I would do. My brain chose not to accept it.
I’m the kind of person that needs constant change in my life. Staying still makes me restless. I can spend a few days in a place and suddenly the urge to move on will be strong. Things become almost too familiar, my fingers become itchy, my brain fails to grasp hold of sensible thoughts. My feet are already half-way out the door with a raincoat in one hand and backpack in the other. I was in love, in love with many things. I was in love with a man. A man who had been by my side for a lifetime of memories. Who always held my body in fierce passion and held my hand through devastation. He loved me honestly and completely, and I returned his love with similar vigour. Still, I knew, I couldn’t choose to love just one thing forever. I wanted it all, and in the end, I couldn’t have it. I made a selfish choice. I chose not to choose.
My backpack, still unpacked from my last weekend trip in Europe lay slumped by the side of the door in my bedroom. Only it wasn’t my bedroom, just a room I inhabited on the occasions where I was home. It never truly felt like home. It never had. Did I even have a home? When home means something different to each and every one of us. It’s hard to interpret another human being’s idea of home. So we search for it. Search for understanding, search for meaning, search for the physical embodiment of a home for two people that can never call home the same place. And on the way, discreetly and unknowingly. We tear our homes, and each other, apart.
With the winter came sadness, a ghost of the past that came blowing in on the wind. A cold and fierce demon threatening to suck all happiness from the world. I felt it worse as the years passed. I never understood it, but it seemed to reach within me and tear out every happy memory I’d kept so dear. Fight or flight? It was time to leave again. So I left.
I remember standing there at the airport. Fighting back the tears. For a moment I almost lost it. I almost stayed. Had he asked me to stay, I would have never boarded the plane. I told him I’d see him on the other side. Goodbyes are always harder than absences. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder. No one ever specified what it is that makes the heart fond. They also say travel broadens the mind. But what does it do to a relationship? When one yearns for a life of travel; to move like a raging river from mountain spring to open sea. The other, for a life of stability; a life of solace, of roots. Of a place to call home. How could a tree survive within the river?
He had chosen his moment wisely, kindly. He loved me so much that he let me go. For that, my heart was broken. But it was the start of beginning to repair my life. Eventually, love was nothing but pain. In loving someone so much, I had lost a part of myself. I had put so much of my life into loving him, that I’d forgotten who I was. It was time to learn again. In choosing not to choose, I chose myself. I chose freedom, I chose not to regret.
