“One way ticket to New York Penn, please.” I’m eavesdropping in the Summit train station on a cold Sunday morning, waiting to buy tickets myself (round-trip, please). My ears perk up when I hear a man order a one-way ticket: how exotic, how exciting. I wonder where he’s going and why: hopping on an Amtrak and starting a new life out west? Moving in with a significant other? Finally leaving his 9 to 5 for a chance at music superstardom?
These are the rather weighty assumptions and implications that come with a one-way ticket. Someone is loftily picking up their life and moving elsewhere: pursuing a dream, advancing a relationship, venturing into the unknown. The wanderlust-filled traveler, the insatiable adventurer, the hopeless romantic, the ambitious employee. Someone uprooting their life with the purchase of one ticket: undeniably, romantically life changing.
I mean Romance in the literary sense -- as an English major I am always thinking in the literary sense. Romance with a capital, “R:” characterized that by the period after Neo-Classism, made unique by a shift in literary ideals. Literature and art were about individual experience and release of emotions. The individual was glorified and nature was mystical. How could this notion, this ticket with no return, not remind me of the Romantic period -- a solitary setting out into the world with nothing but one’s own fears and apprehensions, dreams and ambitions?
I realize that there could be a thousand other reasons this man has only purchased a ticket to New York and not one home. Maybe he is getting a ride back, maybe he was short on cash, maybe he always buys them when he arrives in the station. Maybe I read too many YA novels in my youth that have made me inclined to think every stranger’s life is more rosy and dramatic than my own.
But, to me, returning home is full of romance too. At the end of trip --whether it is an afternoon in the city or a longer vacation -- knowing that’ll I return home is a somewhat magical feeling. There is a mystical connection, even -- between the small suburban town I have always called home and myself. Of course, I have always been a homebody; but returning to the same place is nice in a completely different way. Being embraced by familiarity and warmth; my dog greeting me at the door with wet kisses and a pushy paw, my mom telling me about her day, my slippers and a blanket waiting for me upstairs.
Perhaps that’s why the one-way ticket is romantic and fantastic to me: because I never picture myself buying one without immense amounts of planning and intention.
