Category: travel
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A Separate Self
My driver’s license expired a few years ago and it took another year to get reinstated. By the time I got behind the wheel this summer, I hadn’t driven a car since 2014. The experience felt a bit like time travel, throwing me back into all of the days I romanced the road. When I…
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Cliffhanger
Last month my friend Jess announced, “I’m going to a festival in Barcelona and I’ll be doing MDMA for five days straight.” I pictured her covered in henna tattoos, lit on Molly, dancing on a moon-kissed beach. The romancing of her life and drug use was jarring—in part, because I’m sober and also because, it’s…
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Strip Tease
“You’d be at home in San Francisco—there are little earthquakes every day,” someone once said to me. The summer after I called off my wedding and traveled around the world, I was looking to find a place to stay put. San Francisco was a befitting destination, to somehow settle an unsettled girl. Months before I arrived,…
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A Girl Gone: Chapter II
What Happened? Since You Asked… I started this blog when I was living out of my car. I had just called off my wedding and left to travel across the U.S. and around the world with no itinerary or plans to return. I remember those early days with such awe and clarity. It was deep…
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A Mirror
*Artwork by the very talented Noel Young Very rarely are we given the opportunity to see ourselves through another pair of eyes. A birds-eye view of our own life. A first impression. A last impression. I received word of this piece and wanted to share. I met this writer in Vietnam. Then he wrote about me. **** Saigon.…
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Fixtures
For two years, there was a homeless woman living in the alley next door to my first floor duplex. She had erected a massive fort out of plywood, tarps and shrap metal; an intricate, multiple-tiered fort with a ladder, a closet, and a bed made of blankets and garbage. The police never made her dissemble…
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Art Brain
Last week, a lawyer told me that the mayor of Berlin has declared it an artistic hub, and that immigration authorities should treat artistic visa applications kindly. The city is drawing artists from all over the world for its financial support of the arts, affordability, and the broad and varied arts scene. It is not…
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The Writing on the Wall
I once dated a guy because he rode a Ducati. At least, it seems now, this was his most attractive feature—also, the one that makes the relationship seem appropriate upon reflection. It was college and Joe was my first real “motorcycle boyfriend,” so I took complete advantage of the fact that we were living in…
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Getting There
In travel, I have learned to appreciate the act of “getting there,” the inherent differences in modes of transport, the adventure of self-navigation, and the disorientation of arrival. Air travel, while having the transcendent feel of lift-off, always comes with the most complications: organization of liquids, security, timing, shoe-removal, passport control, customs, general airport racket…
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Fingerprints
On a sunny London morning, a woman careened towards me with a baby carriage, smiling and bouncing with happy. I had just spilled hot coffee down my arm and the front of my shirt. Often, my awakening to children and babies is forced—an occurrence delivered with high-pitched screams and tension, for me, most evident, while…
WAYWARD BETTY 