Traveling in the Amorphous Fleck

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

If my brain were a garage--for some reason that’s the image that pops up when my mind tries to conceive of itself, not a mind palace or even a mid-sized home, but a garage--my memories would be organized into bins labeled with my phase of development and the place where that memory belongs because the stages of my life are defined by the places where I’ve lived.  Thus far it would look something like this: SÃO PAULO - CHILDHOOD; NEW JERSEY- SUBURBS; AMSTERDAM - MIDDLE SCHOOL; NEW YORK CITY- HIGH SCHOOL; RURAL UPSTATE NEW YORK - COLLEGE.  Between those bins are some 20 other, smaller ones from the other countries I’ve visited.  They hold stacked and folded memories of interspersed daily Guatemalan rains while the sun is still out, blue and white Portuguese tiles, liquid glass Chinese koi ponds, and pastel German towns hidden in gray valleys. 

In 23 years, I’ve lived in almost as many houses and apartments between my time in Brazil, New Jersey, Amsterdam, and New York.  I’ve also lived briefly in Colorado, during half the year I took off from college in place of the 2020-2021 school year.   I have no doubt that living less than a quarter of my life in the country where I and the four preceding generations of my family (on either side) lived enabled me to see moving and traveling as natural, if not integral, to the living of my life.  Even if it means living life out of suitcases.  

Suitcase size and etiquette is a contentious part of traveling; the schism between the check-a-baggers versus the carry-oners has, in my mind, been put most concisely by my partner’s grandmother, who, among her many other wise sayings, asks of those loaded travelers, “are you there to see or be seen?”

She is 85, has a head of wispy red hair, and travels frequently.  Most often, Florence is her city of choice.  However, she has also been to Alaska and Turkey this past year.  

When we told her that we’re going to Peru–that I was awarded a Fulbright grant to teach there for a year–she can’t wait for us to visit this summer because she has things to show us.  

When we get there, there is a sign written in blue ink on lined paper, scotch-taped: “The door is open.  I am here!”  We walk in, immediately saturated by the undeniable smell of her house--partly moth ball, partly patchouli perfume layered altogether with cat fur and aging cashmere.  It feels soft, like warm silence.  

She lauds the merits of travel, telling us stories over the bean dip from her local Mexican supermarket and, after lunch, displaying all the craftwork she bought from local artisans on each of her trips to Guatemala, Peru, and Bolivia, in turn.  She shows us a plain binder filled with unorganized pictures and small memories like plane ticket stubs and postcards.  She shows us the small, leatherbound reporter’s notebook in which she and her husband kept note of what they thought important: she, names of people and details about them and he, the costs of meals and excursions so that they could budget the expenses into their teachers’ salaries upon their return.  She was--and still is--a (mostly carry-on) world traveler: she does at one point admit to us that she bought so many Peruvian arpilleras that she had to buy another suitcase.  

Dutch writer, A.L. Snijders wrote, “for more than fifty years I have cherished one wish: to travel.  This wish is part of another wish: for reality without reality--stories that are indistinguishable from the truth.”  I’m sure this is true of many travelers, those we now identify with the term wanderlust.  Although my partner’s grandmother similarly cherishes travel, I don’t believe she shares Snijder’s underlying motivation.  I believe that she loves people and seeks to expand her world by learning about theirs. 

My trouble with Snijder’s sentiment is that for the permanent traveler--I will never accept the snobby and untruthful title of global citizen--the reality without reality and plain old reality become one; there is no point of comparison where ‘the trip’ ends and ‘home-life’ begins.  And, in turn, the amorphous fleck that is life becomes, at times, rather lonely––existentially, at least.  

Because none of these places feel like they’re places of my belonging, they’re just places I’ve lived, or visited.  ‘Living somewhere,’ or ‘being from somewhere’ tends to take an existential tinge for most people: their home, their place.  And even if they’ve moved, maybe they know, or their families know, people from their childhood--maybe they even get holiday cards from them.  

But me, when asked ‘where are you from?’ I am left to give my spiel about the places I’ve lived, and it is an unsatisfying answer to us both.  But satisfaction in certainty is what I’ve learned to stop seeking, because in my life, it appears to be in deeply short supply.  I’ve learned, in turn, to pack only a carry-on suitcase and do what Morgan Harper Nichols’ poem puts wonderfully: “find peace / and grow / in the wild / of changing things.”