Traveller

I have these dreams of a nomad life, on a blowing road. Just me, my feet and some rusty trailer van. Cold nights adjourned with blankets, the chill of loneliness offset only by the warmth of solitude... Oh how these visions bloom inside my head, every time I let my racing mind pause for breath, a spring flower thought blooming out of the mundane frost. I can hear the music, I don't know where it's playing from, some soundtrack to it all - I invite the musicians into my home on wheels, I don't know their names or their stories. And yet they play them for me as though we are long lost friends, bonding over some camp fire, exchanging memories like currency. My cat travels with me, of course - a furry friend to curl up with, another soul to study, a release for my maternal instincts that will go undoubtedly buried.

I pause, and mourn quietly for the loss of the life I grew up supposed to have. My grandmother's hands in soapy water, her voice narrating a husband with hands to wash me, whilst my mind is drifting off into a barn alight with feet, somewhere. I know how to be still, but only when everything around me is in chaos. I know how to move with the wind, let my feet bleed raw, leave the pavement beneath me wanting more... but only when everything around me is stagnating. I do not feel up, nor down, not here, nor there. I remind myself that this - this is the beauty of being. The song changes, and now I am a ballet dancer with all the softness of rain - no, the reflections of rain on a car dashboard, I wouldn't exist without the streetlight... I am unwashed droplets on the windscreen, I look like a thousand stars when another car comes over the horizon. I am nothing without this music, this poetry, this world which taught me how to feel.

I turn onto my back and cover myself in the blankets, each which held lover after lover. Each who held me, broke me, soothed me, healed me, taught me how to heal myself. Taught me how to comfort myself, like a panicked child - to forgive myself, I murmur softly "I know why you thought those terrible things, I understand, I forgive you, I love you, I love you." I exhale my old hopes and dreams, a husband, a home - they had built up like a thick tar in my lungs, slowly choking me and forcing me to learn how to breathe in a different way. I inhale my freedom. I question my sanity. I laugh, because that is all you can do. I smile to myself, because I know so little about who I am - the only thing I know for sure, is that I Am A Traveller.

I Am A Traveller.
I travel at lightning speed through the galaxy, I travel year upon year around the sun.
I travel through the moments of my life, experiencing each day as though it had already been written - as though some omnipotent being has given me one last chance to live it all again - I hold each moment to my chest and let my heart fill with a buttery mixture of sweet joy and sweeter grief, and I cast it aside with the most gentle, soft ruthlessness I can muster as I travel to the next now, and the next, and the next...
I am a traveller. As I lie in my trailer on the side of the road, wrapped in the blankets of my past, all those people I never really knew, and I let them keep me warm. I'm on some hillside, some unknown place again in my mind. But all is home to a traveller. And I am a traveller.

As the song tails off into silence, I lay fixed in my solid bed, in my solid home on solid ground, wheel-less and stationary. I have lived here for nearly two years, and every day I have travelled. To memories I will never experience, to dreams that will never come to be, and yet exist just as beautifully as real life, if only I always allow myself to travel to them. I cannot bring myself to close that door of my soul, it is the only door I have ever known, one I built somewhere deep within myself. I feel it is a part of myself that cannot be given, or sold, or shown.

It seems there is so much talk of letting other people into ourselves, but never is it mentioned of how to let ourselves out.