The Collector

        I make a list of all the things I want to buy. A night splint for my sore foot, a bottle of wine, a pack of sharpies in all colors to while the hours away, stimulate the creative part of my brain somehow. Then I add up the dollar signs, and I don’t add them to my Amazon cart. Because I’m being adult and responsible this year. With Money. With Dollars. With the zeroes and ones, tens and hundreds and thousands in my bank account, written there in plain black ink, until it gets transferred to Chase or Amex or whatever. It’s not tangible anymore, but it’s still real. Weird, huh?

Instead, I write the items onto a note on my phone, so now I have 1853 notes and not 1852. It’s funny to think about that, isn’t it? 1,853 thoughts just spilled out there. How many more of my thoughts will become eternalized in the cloud in my lifetime? When I die, will someone remember my passcode and get into there? Think that’s what is in her head? I wonder what they would be able to understand, how many notes they’d pause over, before moving on, before putting the phone down and accepting my absence from the world. What will they get from the half baked stories, some poems on existential crises, a couple rough attempts at eulogizing my father that I wrote in a panic right before he was given two months to live and then survived, grocery lists, random ideas of things I want to do in the future, things I wanted to buy, some frustrated musings on how much I need to get out of this time, and finally, travel plans. 

So many travel plans. 

40 countries by the age of 30. Possible? Maybe. 

40 states by the age of 30? Excessive? Quite. 

A marathon on every inhabited continent by 30? The most painful of them all. 

Is such a trifecta feasible? Maybe. 

Is it necessary?  Doubtful. 

Will I try? Almost certainly. 

Yet why do I obsess over it, like it’s all I have to live for?  Like the people writing the travel blogs that flaunt visiting 60 countries by 30 or God forbid, 100 countries by 30, have achieved something more than I have? 

Why do I act like travel is all that makes me interesting? Or all that I have? 

Why do I act like I don’t have a career? Or friends. Hobbies. A parent who literally needs me to put him on the toilet and into bed every night.  A knack for data. A knack for words, and the courage to perform at poetry readings in front of 80 people I don’t know. And as if that’s not enough to pretend that I’m a real adult, a 401k. 

      Instead, my brain is stuck on this one-track mind. This vision that I was going to be one of those people who spent their 20s and 30s and hopefully 40s-80s traveling the world, living abroad, visiting all the countries I can barely even imagine. 

      Diapers? Not really in the cards I thought I had laid out. 

      My father’s diapers? Even less so. 

      My siblings send ideas.  They send gifts, and one day, one sends green juice and guess who changes the results of that ill-gotten diaper for days? They talk about their trips and their lives. Their lives that go on, while I do this. And I find myself wishing the rest of my dad’s life away because caregiving is hard! And I want him here as long as he can be, but he’s not the person he used to be, and that’s hard too. But then, as I put him to bed, while I'm waiting five minutes before I can give him his second set of eye drops, he sings Judy Garland’s “Meet me in Saint Louis” in his raspy voice and I know that letting him go seems like it will make life easier, but it won’t be easier. 

      But still, I know the moment is going to come, so I try to picture what my life will be in the future, but all I can do is look backwards. All I can do is see myself sitting in my 300 square foot studio in Belgium.  I didn’t have a comfy chair so my back and hips constantly hurt. There were nights I slept atrociously, because I could never get the settings on the heater quite right, and the bed that came free with the place, felt like a granite slab, and sometimes, or rather most of the time, I stayed up well past an acceptable hour, because my friends were back home and my mom was back home, and they’d be texting me until 3 a.m. And yet, I was happy. Everything was new and exciting. Even the monotony of the laundry, that was just my life, and it didn’t really matter. But here? Even the people. My best friends from 3 different countries who now all live in 3 more different countries. And yet, here I am. Back in my hometown in the United States, the exact place I swore I’d never end up again. 

       I have this big comfy bed, because my brother was always into buying nice things when he lived here, and now it’s mine. But even in this big house, with my parents, and dinner on the table, I’m not grateful. I should be, but I’m really not. 

        My fingers are typing in the words Google Flights without even trying. I’m comparing flight prices to Europe, to Africa, to the rest of the 50 states. I’m getting excited about the next, next, next escape before I’ve even been on the upcoming one. 

        And sometimes, I do reminisce. Truly. I don’t want to sound ungrateful,  because I know how lucky I am.  And I know I can say I’ve been this many places because of my priorities, because of my hard work, and that’s true to a high degree, but privilege plays into it too. And I don’t dispute that. So I do reminisce. Sometimes, I’m making videos and photo collages and photo maps of all the places I’ve been, all the stories I have been part of it for a single moment. A lot of the time, I think I forget the importance of where I’ve been though. I get lost in what else I could do. I get lost in the imagination of running my final marathon on my 30th birthday in São Tomé and Príncipe, or seeing the Northern Lights in Iceland. In my head, I’m already on my 50th state, joining the “Best for Last” Club as I complete a half marathon in Fargo, North Dakota. Or I’m biking with my mom in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. Or working remotely from Lexington, Kentucky. I live in the anticipation of too many places, hoarding dreams like I can be nothing beyond travel, like if you ripped the adventurous spirit from me, I would be nothing else. 

      But that’s not where I should be. I should be in a four bedroom house in Australia circa October 2017, when I wandered my friend’s party as the sole American present, and asked everyone where I should travel next. That 23-year-old thought that Australia was the best place in the world. That 23-year-old didn’t need 30 countries, or 40, or 50 states.  

On that Friday night, I bounced ideas off of Australians – the best people to ask about their own country, because they love to travel! At one point, I snuck away from a conversation with a hurried, “Sorry, I’ll be right back. I just need some gummy worms” and when I returned, snack in hand, they looked at me in distinct confusion, “What are gummy worms?” I held up my snack in similar confusion, tilting my head at the man who had clearly purchased and brought them. “They’re jelly snakes”, he said firmly, and when I turned the candy over in my hands and spared it a closer glance, it became apparent that they were. He said, “Jenna, I’ll tell you what. If you do run the Melbourne Marathon, I’ll reward you with a packet of jelly snakes.” And so he did. And so, the next day, I sat down with my laptop and booked a last minute trip to Queensland, like I had been told. I spotted koalas and fed wallabies, and built a deep friendship with a British woman I will never ever see again, that started with asking the crew if they could give us apples and honey to celebrate Rosh Hashanah.

In Tel Aviv, I made out with a stranger as the clock struck midnight on New Years and got kicked out of a cab because I couldn’t say the name of my street right. In Petra, my tour guide took me into a tomb, told me to close my eyes and tried to kiss me. When I pushed him away and said “No”, he told me he was only going to whisper in my ear. In Jerusalem and Berlin, I fell for scams. And in Tzfat, I got into a car with a stranger who told me he “was a good guy”. While his words didn’t exactly inspire confidence, he delivered me safely to my destination. 

In Haarlem, I eavesdropped for hours on an interesting conversation while eating tapas, and alternating tea and cocktails. I rented a bike and rode through a national park with wild horses, and along a beach, where I drank hot chocolate and ate bitterballen in a beach bar. In Geneva, I went to the sauna and jumped into the lake afterwards, even though it was February. 

In Croatia, I biked through the part of an island that no one else seemed to find, and swam in my clothes just because I could, while dodging sea urchins at every turn. And I also did my laundry, and visited the Museum of Broken Relationships. 

In Slovenia, I climbed a mountain, and in France, I ran a marathon dressed as a tortoise even though I couldn’t communicate with anyone and even though the sign at the race had a hare and a snail instead of a tortoise and a hare. And then I ate beef tartare and frog legs and escargot, because when in Rome, right? And in the Philippines, I ate a hard boiled fertilized duck egg while watching the sunset. 

In Montenegro, I got so sick I could barely walk for 5 minutes without breaking into a coughing fit that I could not stop. And in Bosnia, I got food poisoning. But I also visited beautiful mountains and waterfalls, and ate home cooked meals, and drove down some harrowing roads. 

And in Ecuador, I practiced my rough Spanish, and swam with sea lions and sea turtles. 

But I’ve become the collector who has everything, and still feels like I don’t have enough. I never really wanted the traditional things – the marriage, the house, kids. And yet, I can’t rid myself of this deep seeded anxiety that I’ll never have seen enough of the world. Like I look at the lists, and the goals people set, and I’m nowhere near, and I read about places I want to go, and suddenly I need to. I need more. But I need to, I want to find a way so that I don’t? So that I can have a big goal, an accomplishment that isn’t just about ticking places off a list, no matter how many deep and cool memories come with it. The reality is even if I go to every country, and I won’t, it’ll never be enough. I’m collecting a thing that you can never get to the end of, and I know, if I don’t find a way to satiate myself, I’m just going to spend the rest of my life running from destination to destination, feeling like I need something else, feeling like I need more. 

But, my fingers tap out the letters that lead me to Google Flights, and it’s only $300 to go to Portugal in May, so I click, “Purchase this Flight”.