How We Travel is How We Care for Ourselves

I hold my breath everywhere I go as if my breath is about to be taken from me.

This morning, I arrived at LAX at 6:28 am for my flight. It boarded at 6:38. The first question of travel is how long you give yourself at the airport. Do you rush or do you arrive in time to be in a relaxed state? I rush. I once woke up at 6:00 am and made a 7:00 am flight to DC. (Don’t ask.) Yes, I left my car at LAX across the street. Of course, I was unbathed. When I arrived in my seat, I felt like I had been born again.

My friend, Francesca, arrives at the airport an hour or two before flights. She breathes. I run through airports. I have taken off boots and streaked through O’Hare and Heathrow. I have missed flights. Hung out in Heathrow for hours.

I keep myself in motion. The rush is constant.

I am here in New York for three days, so I have just a backpack with essentials for the Brooklyn Book Fair: my laptop, my manuscript iPad, and a few clothes. I never travel with food, but sometimes, I experience the childish comfort of lollipops or jellybeans.

Francesca would have checked a suitcase. She would have walked through the airport with no luggage. Breathing. She seems civilized when I travel with her. Like a stately boat traveling along smooth waters. She says she does all this to calm her anxiety. But to me, she looks like a summer pond.

Traveling with me is like pushing the panic button. I am always convinced I left something in the last place. I have left credit cards, wallets, iPads, and jewelry all over the world. I am always thinking of the story I want to write rather than the story I am living. The narrative in my head is so much bigger than my passport, my wallet. I realize that it’s part of having ADD, but my mind is always focused on something I wish I could stop to write down or something I just read on the plane. I am not in the travel.

When I arrive in New York, I take the train from Jamaica to Penn. I walk to my hotel.

Francesca would take a car. Her journey would feel calm. The whole process would involve breathing.

I hold my breath everywhere I go as if my breath is about to be taken from me. 

I rush. There is no breathing. But walking down the sidewalk in New York, I think sometimes I must live in this city, even part time. I love the streets, the subway, the rhythm. I don’t do the normal New York things. I have no favorite New York restaurants. I like the High Line and Chelsea Market. I like walking along the river, eating slices of pizza late at night, I like the guys playing sax in the subway stations and the way the whole city wails and purrs from morning to night, and people pour in and out of coffee and bookstores and bars and fashionable stores. If I lived here, I feel sure I could master fashion and be dripping with style. I feel sure I could be born again.

I flew back to Los Angeles this morning on a 6:00 am flight and was on the morning call with the staff at 9:00 am. The Los Angeles heat thrashed around me, I fell from one meeting to the next, and in one Zoom, we talked about poetry, and there was a moment that I was like Francesca in an airport, paused from my mad swooping, remembering the slowest and most exquisite of art forms, remembering why I fell in love with writing in the first place, listening to Major Jackson’s voice thrum as he talked about poetry he loves and thinking that at the beginning of my writing life, like all of us sitting around the campfires at the beginning of the world, I was so excited by poetry, I couldn’t breathe.  

I left that conversation, fell right out of the day, and read Harryette Mullen, who writes in “The Sky is Falling,”

It’s whether or not

                     you don’t need man

fingering prevailing wind     bothering clouds

Ah, Harryette, none of us need a man for joy. But me? I could settle down and see what I’m really about. I could find my bearings. I could look up and see what’s bothering the clouds. I could take a breath.