'cause if i can, i'll walk the sky

[erika]

I took my passport out and stared at it this morning, trying to remember what it felt like to fly over an ocean, to look out the window of a plane and know that I would be, soon, someplace I'd never remembered being before.

I got that little blue book four years ago, to go to Venezuela. I must've been twelve, flying alone and unaccompanied, but it didn't feel that way. It felt free, and though I know I was scared, part of me was so utterly sure I could handle it. I felt... I don't know how I felt.

Truthfully? I was 12, for Christ's sakes, I'm pretty sure I cried when I got on the prop plane that took me to O'Hare and away from my parents for a month. But I was strong when it counted. I know, because when they randomly cancelled the last plane to Venezuela on me, and I was stranded in Miami, I kept my wits about me long enough to call relatives for help, and spent the night with a newly-wed Fara and her husband, in a futon in the living room. They had AOL, I remember, and I kept picking up the phone to call my mother and disconnecting the service.

And now it's four years later, and I finger the soft leather of the blue book, the proud bearer of a stamp saying "Venezuela" inside, the only country outside of the US I've ever had the honor of experiencing.

Venezuela... the country that my father lived in for the first twenty years of his life, before living here for twenty-five -- marrying, having four children, and becoming an expatriate. I wonder, idly, if I'm setting out on the same path. It all started when he went to college here, you know.

I wonder if it hurt him to leave his family. He hasn't been back for fifteen years -- I have a passport from when I was a baby, a one year old little girl who took her first steps in the Miami airport that I cried in, alone, almost exactly 11 years later. Would it have comforted me then if I knew, that somewhere along the corridors there was a memory of me running from my mother's arms to my father's waiting hand... to walk down that hallway and onto the plane for the first time?

Probably not. You don't really appreciate those things when you're 12.

But now it's 4 years later, and I use the same passport to go to a new place. I'll be in O'Hare again, but this time no prop plane will take me there; my mother will drive me, probably just so that I can listen to her lecture me about not having sex for another four hours.

Does it take a certain kind of strength to go somewhere you've never been? It seems like all my life I've been experiencing new territory. I never had the sad luxury of an insular outlook, that oxymoron of a provincial upbringing. I always knew that there were other places in the world that called me, languages and accents to twist my tongue around, other countries for me to explore... people for me to see.

I've kept my passport current, you see, and now I blow the dust off, softly flip through its pages, then smile and pat it softly. Soon, I promise. Soon.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/labyrinthine_/]

Does it take a certain kind of strength to go somewhere you've never been?

I think it takes curiosity. moving somewhere you've hardly (or never) been takes some serious strength.

[erika]

I think it takes strength to get on the plane. At least it will for me.

[sidebarboy.livejournal.com]

Whipping that baby through customs is better than any shopping expedition that you could possibly mount.
The bureaucratic thump of the stamp hitting your pasport...
I'm so envious! Bon Voyage! :-)

[marigold.livejournal.com]

I think to go alone to a place you've never been before takes strength. Although you won't really be alone, your journey will be.

[erika]

Ooh, good point.