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Last year, I visited my family for the first time in over two years. I'd last seen them when I went out west for a Hozier concert, and then took the ferry over to the island where they live. That was October 2019, two months before, uhhh, well...and then travel restrictions and masks and figuring out how things would work in a new era of caution blasted additional best-laid plans. I got plane tickets in mid-November of 2021. It was going to be to fly out after Christmas. Two days after I got the tickets, the news announced a new variant. Scientists were calling it, "Omicron".
That paused things for another nine months, and in the meantime, I left my job, technically had a week of unemployment (which helped empty and reset my mind), and started a new, more fulfilling opportunity. But I could feel myself getting drawn in: _I can't take a vacation right now, I've got so much to learn, what will my co-workers think of me, when will I -_
Knowing that I could put things off forever in the uncertainty of everything going on, I decided not to, and visited my family for a few days. It was a great trip. It was an awful trip. My Canadian side of the family got together and were in the same room for the first time since my wedding, but I also had to deal with a very sudden health crisis, spending most of my last day out west sitting in an emergency ward with my parents, providing help and support, briefly meeting with my sister outside the hospital as we laughed at the general absurdity of the situation, putting out of our minds what it would mean going forward.
So the last trip I took was three days in 2022. Not bad. But before that, when my partner and I went out to Newfoundland in 2018. Which is to say, I've been feeling the need to travel again recently, and badly. But seeing news articles showing that 95% of planes whose wastewater has been tested show COVID is a bit of a damper. I wonder to myself when it will be truly safe to travel again. If.
When my friends and I were younger, we made all kinds of travel plans, because when you're young and broke, it's an easy and indulgant bit of fantasy. Montreal. Ireland. A road trip down the east coast. Any one of those things would've been amazing, but I didn't any savings all throughout my younger years. University took most of my money. I had a few bucks here and there for treats and snacks. But I'd basically figured out how little I needed to work to get by, and ran with it. I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd done any of those plans. Travelling halfway across the country by bus (you could do that then!) to see someone who may or may not still tend a flame? That would've been incredible. Not to say it would've worked. But the experience would have been indelible.
Now that I'm older, after a year being a broke Ph.D. student (many years ago) put a deep fear of poverty in me, I've got my savings to the point where if I could drop everything, I could go just about anywhere. But how easy is that to do now? I've fallen out of touch with many of my friends, and those with whom I made the closest plans seem to have drifted the furthest. And who would want to go? Judging by the rare time I check in on Facebook, we're all tightly tending our families or relationships, houses and gardens. How many of us would get the time off? Who would look after our pets and plants? We would've been nomads and now halfway through our lives we find ourselves firmly settled.
Perhaps it was always the case that it's easier to drop everything if you don't have much to drop. Easier to plan than act. But it feels like so much of the day to day conspires to act against us, is a push towards docility and repetitive consumption.
My entire life I've fought a part of me best described as wantonly restless. That would have me pick up, leave my life behind, set things on fire. Not for any real reason, though maybe that's the point: stop being so settled; at some point, you'll be dead; and don't you want to just scream hearing the same people saying the same things? Injecting their episodic similarity into your already repetitious life?
I've fought it because there's a larger part of me, owing to my Ph.D. year, the year in which I had $30 a week for groceries, that's terrified of waking up broke. Of looking around, finding myself at 50, my friends gone, relationships broken, living in some shabby apartment that I can barely afford to rent, my only food potatoes, rice, boiled cabbage, cuts of nearly-expired meat. Fighting my hunger by drinking pot after pot of hot, black tea.
And so, entering the fourth year of the pandemic (fuck), I find that nagging voice back with a vengeance. Telling me not to worry about the virus, that I've had my recommended shots, that there's a whole world out there, dwindling. That there are people I need to meet, and aren't. Didn't. I'm trying to listen to this voice and give it some space, because I know, in this context, it's right. I'm trying to make plans to see my family again as well. Searching for people and places and meaning in plague times, wondering what I'll see, and who I'll never meet before I die.