Flies are dancing around the coffee shop in twirls and spins as I sip a lavender mocha, overpriced but enjoyable. In one week, I’ll catch a one-way flight to Iceland, from there to Paris, where I’ll tramp my way to Croatia hunting for the cure to a quarter-life crisis. The coffee shop blares Elton John, then Red Hot Chili Peppers, then something heavy in brass and maracas. Heavily-tatted people in Carhart hats and faded jeans laugh, old men in sandals read the local paper, and a lady surveys the tea wall for the third time.

     A friend will come with me, Christian, a co-worker I once despised, and who despised me, but bitterness breeds good friendships, and so it was with us. We dated the same girl, one after the other, before being housed together for a long weekend of work. As we talked, we realized the girl had a type: free-spirits, adventurous, spontaneous, that she had good taste in men. We became fast friends, and since then I’ve wondered if I shouldn’t fish for more friends from my ex’s exes.

     He’s the true traveler, going unabashedly into the unknown. I’m a meanderer, with unsteady steps and a skepticism that life’s answers can be found just as well in a fly-filled coffee shop as on Morocco’s white sand shores, perhaps even more so. Nonetheless, we’ll go to Croatia and shop for a sailboat, hopefully find a retired charter vessel to repurpose as a full-time liveaboard. From there we’ll follow the winds, leave it up to chance, and pray for serendipity.

…           

     I dreamed of sailing the world as a kid, not for a love of boats, or water, or even new places, but for the freedom of it. It wasn’t a desire to go somewhere new that filled my head with sails, but that a sailor was perpetually leaving. I was raised on a small island, Vashon, near Seattle, in the Puget Sound, which felt progressively smaller as I grew up. The same faces kept popping up at the same corners, telling the same stories of a younger me. Your history in a place, the thing that ties you to that place, sometimes ties you down, and all the memories can become an anchor.

     In order to change, I felt I needed to leave, so when the time came, I left, and I have never stopped leaving it seems. From Washington to Colorado, to Utah, Alabama, Tennessee, each place allowed me to be someone new without anyone’s memory to bind me. I grew unencumbered, a sunflower always facing the sun.

     I fundamentally believed in “finding myself,” though I realize now that’s a curious concept. Who hid him? Me? My parents? The Republican Party? Perhaps it was God, who is such a big fan of Find Waldo he makes all his conscious creatures play it on a global scale. I grew up thinking the true me was somewhere else, he must be, because he wasn’t on Vashon. I had checked every inch of that island. He was probably in one of the big metropolises, I thought, or likely somewhere foreign. That belief kept me going, but hopelessness sets in easy. The world is so, so big, and I have often felt very small.

     On my twenty-first birthday, I found myself emotionally, mentally, and socially lost in the white and brown dorms of Brigham Young University. For all the seeking, I had little direction in life, few opportunities, almost no financial means, and I had no one to share all that nothingness with. As I lay in bed that morning, my future seemed like a dark void and my present a shallow, muddy puddle. My life was full of acquaintances, small talk, and meaningless pleasantries. It felt that no one really knew me, and how could they? People advised that I should just be myself, but for all the places I’d lived (a meager four, at the time), I’d never met the dude. All I had lined up for my birthday was a date I had gotten from a dating app. Worst of all, it was to a Christian comedy show. “Not all twenty-first birthdays are created equal,” I thought.

     However, the show was good and the girl was fun. Lauren. At the end of the show, she suggested we keep the night going, so we picked up the glowsticks the comedy troupe had thrown, stole some sandwiches from a nearby school dance, grabbed my speaker, and snuck into an abandoned building soon-to-be torn down. We sprayed the walls with glowsticks, blasted music, ate sandwiches, and danced. Finally, we snuck up to the roof where we talked quietly and looked over the campus. When Lauren learned it was my birthday, she said, “we have to do more!” It was two in the morning, but I was in need of an adventure, of something. So, we slept briefly and left at six for some hot springs which she promised were gorgeous. They were.

     Two hours of driving later we were in some cow pastures in the middle of nowhere, but sure enough, there were the hot springs, flush with the ground; you could trip into one if you weren’t watching. They are odorless and clear, save for the scent of manure on the breeze, and are filled with crystalline turquoise water which goes down deep, about nine meters in the deepest. We swam and laughed and kissed. We didn’t talk much about ourselves, only light stuff, which was nice. I don’t know what I would have said if anything big had of been asked. Some hours later we went home. As she dropped me off, she explained she’d be leaving soon to be a missionary and that she probably shouldn’t get too connected to anyone before she left. “I understand,” I said. I went home exhausted and slept, and we parted ways.

     It’s a good story—a spontaneous, flirtatious, redheaded guardian angel, found on a Christian dating app, sent to deliver me from a hopeless birthday and then disappear. Exactly twenty-one hours of adventure, from the time I walked out my door to the time I walked back through it, on my twenty-first birthday. I like those poetic, elemental distinctions. But I also like it because that was the day I stopped searching for myself, half out of hopelessness, half because I realized there are better things to do.

…

     Packing for the trip has been a considerable pain. The trip will span four months, three seasons, and be spread across two continents, and I only have a backpack and a carry-on to prepare. “What do I have room for?” has been on my mind nearly 24/7 for the past couple of weeks, and as certain things make it into the bag and others are left out, I feel I am winnowing down my personality. I have always said that if you’re packing two pairs of jeans, you’re overpacking, yet as I realize this isn’t just a trip, this is a lifestyle I’m embarking on, I find the question, “am I a black denim or blue denim kind of person?” far more important.

     At the time of writing this the bags are packed, and I have often caught myself staring at them thinking, “this will be my whole life, packed tightly away into those two bags.” For some people, I imagine this realization comes with the force of epiphany, but for me, it came like a sunrise: they’re not. They’re just the stuff I adorn my life with, nothing more, nothing less. This is one of the beauties of travel, it is an escape from materialism. Among the many escapes that travel offers, this is one of the finest.

…

     “No man walks through the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” I went back to the island, now twenty-one, a stranger having not seen my friends for three years. I was afraid the only place I could call home would be foreign now. It was, at first, but childhood friendships are cut deep, perhaps because of the trauma, perhaps because of the nostalgia. Even after years of neglect, fondness flowed easily between myself and my high-school friends.

     That summer my beliefs began to change and I chased new pursuits. I became less focused on a divinity outside oneself and more interested in the divinity within. People became more interesting, and I became, slowly at first, then quite rapidly, a people person. The divine traits in people, creativity, empathy, love, humor, patience, sacrifice, they all became more apparent when I severed them from the stars.

     Groucho Marx once said, “I never met a person I didn’t like,” and suddenly I related. That summer I learned to prune Japanese maples from an old, gay gardener (“so a bird can fly through them”), and how to tac a sailboat from a weed-smoking, homeless hippie, and that summer a retired-financier-turned-forester began giving me weekly copies of the New Yorker to encourage my literary side. Each one of those people is very different, yet each I related to deeply and liked deeply. I gained a deep appreciation not only of nature, but of art from the gardener, and him and the financier are, as far as I can remember, the first people who encouraged me not only to write but to become a writer. As for the hippie, well, in his words, “fuck it, man, sometimes you just got to go with it,” and that, too, I have taken with me.

…

     I have found that there are two ways to travel the world in life: through the exploration of breadth and through the exploration of depth. This trip will be largely the former, a mad dash across the globe, hopping borders like a jump rope, living tight and fast. This type of travel is a rush, fun, and looks good on Instagram. It fills your passport, but it also drains your financial and emotional reserves. It is hard living, done frugally.

     The latter is in many ways the opposite. To explore the depth of the world is to interact and empathize with the people that fill it. Each person is a world unto themself, with unique perspectives, humors, divinities, and experiences to share, and getting to know them is a form of travel, I believe. This form of travel brings less pleasure, but more fulfillment. It makes fewer stories, but facilitates the sharing of them. Doing it you meet fewer people, but make more friends. It is difficult in its own ways.

     Meeting people has always scared me. I have the needs of an extrovert but the social anxiety of an introvert. As a teenager, I would get queasy around pretty girls, and the few times I ventured a date with one I really liked I got so sick I’d puke. “If I throw up, it just means I really like you,” I always meant to say, but never could, and I doubt it would have convinced them anyways. But I spent time as a missionary, which helped a little, and then, the summer after working with the gardener, I worked as a door-to-door salesman, which helped a lot. Were it not for that job this trip wouldn’t be possible, not only because it financed the tickets, but it also got me to a point where I can actually get to know the places I travel to, make quick connections, risk the conversation. In that way, it has enabled both forms of travel for me.

…

     The road trip home to Seattle from Tennessee, where I have done my last couple of years of selling, felt longer this year, perhaps because this trip was on the horizon. It is going to be a nonstop rush, with few, if any pauses, and I’m a naturally sedate person. When something happens to me, I like to find time to stop, process it, inspect it from different angles, and formulate a thought. But when a week, two weeks, three weeks go by without those opportunities for reflection, I feel adrift in the traffic of experiences, like I’m playing Frogger with no end in sight. That said, I know there are quiet coffee shops around the world, with their own overpriced lavender mochas, strange playlists, and ladies surveying the tea wall for the third time.

     On the trip back a lot happened, I met a lot of family for the first time, but that is a subject for another piece, though I will tell of a quick coincidence that happened when I stopped in Utah. I was staying with the old roommates when Christian came by to pick up an instant pot he left in Tennessee. Christian drives a Mercedes Sprinter van converted for living in. It was once nicknamed “The Cinnamon Roll” for the splotches of rust that dot and stripe its white paint job (the name is much cuter feel than the look). I carried the instant pot out to The Cinnamon Roll, which was carrying two girls, Jojo and Lala, who Christian had spent a month with in Europe just before the summer. I had heard a small book’s worth of stories about them having worked with quite a few other people who also went on the trip. As Christian slid open the door Jojo popped her head out from the back with a big smile and wild, blonde hair, still damp from the canyon reservoir they had just swam in, and in the passenger seat was Lala whose red hair gave her away instantly. After some three and a half years, it was Lauren.

     I ended up spending the rest of the evening with them, and it was largely what you’d imagine: awkward though fun, full of a sense of wonder at the re-meeting. We had gone different routes in the past three years—her on the mission, served fully and happily, and I away from religion, but that didn’t much matter. She looked happy, and I was happy, and after we got back from a cold, late-night swim in the canyon (at Lauren’s spontaneous suggestion, some things, it seems, never change) we all ended up eating Brazillian food with some of Christian’s other friends off a trunk in a 7/11 parking lot past midnight. While we ate I kept trying to recall a passage from Ovid:

As wave is driven by wave

And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,

So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,

Always, for ever and new. What was before

Is left behind; what never was is now;

And every passing moment is renewed.

I remembered its existence only because I spent so damn long trying to translate that verb-heavy passage, but at this moment it seemed like time well spent.

     On the morning of my twenty-first, laying in that bed, I never could have imagined my life would lead here to a trip like this. “If I work really hard, maybe by the time I’m thirty,” seemed the most reasonable hope, and was my honest thought. Why that dream got expedited I don’t know. Maybe it was hard work, good luck, a sharp head, I’m not sure. It definitely feels as if some kind of divinity was at play, but whether that came from inside myself or outside, I can’t tell.

     I know that I’m not going on this trip to find myself, or anything else for that matter. I just want to take in what the world has to offer, not go snipe hunting for ultimate truths. That can be done in a far more comfortable place, and in a far cheaper way. I’m going because I want to drink life to the lees, experience all it has to offer, the deep loves, the wonders, the heartbreaks and losses, and because I don’t know what else is really worth my time. This time I’m not leaving to escape, or seek, but simply to seize. A few lines later Ovid said, “all things change, all things flow; what once was, or now is, will not be tomorrow.” I’m leaving to make the most of today.