“But you have to be careful who you meet,” he said, stoking a pipe thoughtfully. “You can’t unmeet them.”
- “Tiger Lily,” by Jodi Lynn Anderson
There are many upsides to travel: seeing new places, tasting delightful dishes, and meeting incredible people. You’ve probably read numerous articles that tell you how travel can change your life, transform you into a better, more informed, wiser person.
I’ve been to many places, and I have many more to see. I’ve explored Hezekiah’s Tunnels deep beneath Jerusalem, seen the top of Mount Fuji surrounded by rings of clouds, and smelled the thick, intoxicating perfume of incense in Notre Dame.
My adventures are essential parts of who I am, not only because of the life-altering natures of the places themselves but also because of the people with whom I traveled and the people I met.
I hate to break it to you, though, despite all of its positives, travel has one massive downside. It will break your heart. This is the trouble with travel: half of travel is the inevitability of leaving, but the other half is found in sinking your heart into something worthwhile.
At least once, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a place that speaks to you–heart, mind, and soul. I’ve been fortunate enough to come across places like this twice. Ironically, these places were somewhere I either swore I’d never go to or somewhere I thought I would never reach.
The first place is tucked away on a hillside in the Hudson Valley, close enough to New York City that you would never expect to find huge, rocky cliffs or see deer on morning walks.
Every morning, I could see the sun rise over the Hudson River, and at night the sky looked like the darkest of blankets sewn through with gems. Welcome to Nyack, New York, my college town, one of the most eclectic and exuberant, yet unassuming places on earth.
It’s also a place I never thought I’d fall in love with– my parents met at Nyack College, and I didn’t want the pressure of a legacy to carry on. How strange it is to swear never to touch a place and then to fall utterly and irrevocably in love with it.
From the time I was young, the second place stood out in my mind as a fairyland, a cordoned-off corner of the world where time did not reach and where stories came to life. It simply did not seem like such a wonderful place could exist. When I got to go there for myself, the place absorbed me completely, with its bookshops, summer drinks under starry skies, interminable papers, and cobblestone streets.
I was only there for a month, but this city carried a simultaneous vibrancy and seclusion unique to the ancient, relatively untouched places of the world. Welcome to Oxford, England, where I learned that my heart could break to leave a place.
Why am I telling you all of this?
In Jodi Lynn Anderson’s novel, “Tiger Lily,” Tiger Lily’s adoptive father tells her, “But be careful who you meet . . . You can’t unmeet them.”
Nyack and Oxford enchanted me so deeply not only because of their personalities and mysteries but also because of the people I met there. My friends captivated me over late-night Pimms and milkshakes at obscure diners. I made unbreakable connections with kindred spirits over term papers, over campfires on mountains, and whispers in the Bodleian.
And when I left these places and these people and these times, I felt I was leaving pieces of myself behind. I still keep in touch, and I still dream of going back, but I know deep down that it won’t be the same. The new times may be good, or maybe they’ll be difficult, but I’ll treasure the memories of my adventures far inside my heart.
When you’ve reached your place and found your people, eventually you’ll have to leave, maybe temporarily, perhaps for good.
This is the mystery, the beautiful conundrum of travel, both the warning and the encouragement. What we see and who we meet on our adventures cannot be unseen or unmet, and hearts can be broken.
However, my journeys are made complete by my heartache, my wanderlust, my thirst to go back, reunite, and rediscover, and the way my heart whispers, I miss you, I love you, I miss you.
