Whee!

I'm looking forward to December 30th, 2009 more than any other day I can remember. Let me tell you why.

I suppose the story starts in April, 2008, with just about the best first date I've ever had. An afternoon of barefoot studying in the park turned into a blur of conversation, park-wandering,
gallery-visiting, and general joyfulness. In fact, that's not a bad summary of quite a bit of what our relationship came to involve.

To describe exactly how or why Lauren and I fell in love goes well beyond the boundaries of this blog, of our shared senses of privacy, and quite likely of my abilities as a writer. It happened, I'm incredibly happy, and I honestly can no longer imagine feeling otherwise.

"So what the hell are you doing out alone in West Africa?" might be your next question. It's a pretty good one - one I've asked myself countless times. I'll try, now, to share the answer. I am, of course, only sharing my story here. Lauren has her own, and I don't want to tell it for her.

This trip, for me, was never a matter of idle dreaming. I knew I would go. I knew it six years ago, sitting and reading the other sections of "Africa on a Shoestring" on countless quiet African evenings during the year I spent on the road between high school and university. The knowledge of it was the carrot dangling from a stick at the end of university. It was never just something I would do - It was something that defined who I was. Who I wanted to be. Independant. Worldly. Unafraid. Invincible. The usual bag of ego.

Lauren and I talked about this, quite early in fact. Our relationship has always been characterized on an ability to talk openly and honestly about important things, and this was certainly an important thing. But what can you really say? It feels pretty presumptuous, a month or two into a relationship, to start talking about what you'll do in a year. In any case, I don't think I really presented it as something that was going to change - and Lauren couldn't miss how important travel is to me.

And it is important. I sometimes forget that many of the people who I now know haven't known me long enough to see how travel has fit into my life. I've been incredibly lucky - by now I've seen more than 50 countries, and spent a total of something like 3 years out of my 24 out on the road in some way or other. I'm always dreaming of the next trip, and the one after that, and the one after that. Traditionally, time alone on the road has also been the time when I've taken good hard looks at my life and its direction.

All this history came to a head during a stressful day in the winter of 2008, when I logged on to Travelocity and Ryanair and bought myself an air ticket to Morocco, leaving the first of May. There was no return date; anywhere from a year to 2 years was in the cards. Future plans become a hell of a lot more tangible when you have a receipt for them. That receipt kept my head on my shoulders, but it was also a ticket to a conversation that Lauren and I had avoided until then. As the winter rambled on, we finally sat down and talked it out.

It was hard, but as always, it was an open and frank conversation. At the time, it seemed clear to both of us that we wouldn't keep the relationship going while I was away. The real question was how and when it would end. Looking back in hindsight, with all the benefit of fully acknowledged feeling, it's impossible to put myself back into the shoes that sat on the couch that evening and joined in the decision to end the relationship then and there. At that time, though, and under those circumstances, it was the right decision to make. We didn't want to split up at the airport gate.

The next few months were one mighty weird emotional grey area. We both saw other people. We both chatted about it quite comfortably - and I don't think, in either case, our lack of discomfort was feigned. At the same time, we remained very close and very conscious of the fact that very soon, we'd be very far apart. As all this was happening, life kept up its accelerating roll towards the end of term and departure day. You all know how fast time goes by when there are more
things to do than moments in the day. There wasn't a hell of a lot of time to think about the deep end that we were about to dive from.

So we dived. I got on the plane. And I knew pretty early that something was different. I stopped in Oxford to see my old friend Stef. We don't see each other too often these days, and as we talked about the future, our plans, our dreams, I realized that the person she was talking about - the Josh that would never settle anywhere, that wanted only to vagabond around the world doing good and having adventures - that that version of me had been quietly but completely
replaced. She picked this up quickly enough.

"So when are you going to go home?" she asked me. I answered honestly "When I run out of money. When I get tired of it. Or when I start to miss Lauren so much that I can't stand it"

Just saying that out loud for the first time was a relief. Feeling something is one thing. Admitting it is sometimes much harder work. It wasn't ever far from my mind from then on. And so I got back on the plane, and headed of for Morocco. For a couple weeks, I was immersed -
immersed in the sights and sounds and smells of travel, immersed in getting my travel legs back, immersed in conversation with my friend Mike, who had joined me there at the beginning of the trip.

Soon enough, though, I was travelling alone, and it was ponderin' time. After months of being so busy I sometimes could barely think, suddenly I had hours and hours to do just that. To sort through all the mess that five busy years had left in my head. To try and get a handle on who I was now, in May 2009.

As I cruised from place to place in Morocco, living out my daydreams, something weird was happening. I was lonely. Understand that I've never, ever felt lonely before on the road - even when I've been weeks without speaking more than a few words of English, or months without a
familiar face. Never truly lonely.

It felt, honestly, like I was failing as a traveller. It didn't help that Morocco can be a difficult place to make friends with locals, many of whom are out to snag cash from you, but it was more than that. It was a kind of general malaise that had me honestly worried - brave face or not - that for some reason I wasn't cut out for this anymore. Cue soul-searching, round 2!

All through this, I'd been in regular touch with Lauren in a series of long, rambling emails of the most comforting kind. I started to really depend on my visits to the internet cafe to rally my spirits a bit. She had long ago become the person towards whom I directed my own internal narrative when I was seeing anything especially beautiful.

And so I thought. And I thought. And I thought some more. And all that thinking? Completely fucking unnecessary. I knew exactly what was going on. I was in love. I was here. She was there. This was a huge problem.

It seemed pretty reasonable for her to assume that in flying thousands of miles to lose myself in Africa for an undefined period of time, I wasn't exactly concerned with our long-term future. It seemed pretty reasonable that she would move on. Quite unreasonably, this scared the shit out of me. I remember the specific mountain I was staring at, out a window of a Moroccan bus, when I realized that this was what had me tied up in knots. I still agonized for weeks more about what to do.

I wanted to tell her. Of course I did. But what would I be saying? That she should wait like some seaman's wife for me to come home? I worried that it would seem like I was coming right out of left field - I'm well aware that my mental and emotional clock was running a lot faster than normal, that each day held a week or a month's worth of reflection in it, and I wasn't sure that that I wasn't building castles in the air about our relationship itself, about how strong it was, about the future it had.

But that wasn't the only obstacle. It took a while longer to realize that what I really needed to do was face up to my own dreams. Dreams and fears aren't too different, I think. Between the two of them, they lay down the boundaries of our lives, of the possible, of the desirable. We talk all the time about facing our fears, and most of us either have to, or choose to at some time or other. Facing our dreams, though, is a little bit more rare.

I had strung together my entire personal story, the narrative that I used to hold myself together, on this vision of myself as the rugged, independant traveller. At some point, though - and it was my falling in love with Lauren that occasioned this - who I actually was veered well away from who I told myself I was. When we talk about this sort of thing, we tend to speak in tragic tones of "abandoning our dreams." This is a vile little mental trap. My desire not to abandon my dreams of the vagabond life had kept me from realizing what was really going on: that those dreams weren't being replaced, they were being enriched. That my old dreams of travel no longer meant anything without the newer ones, of a home and a family and a life full of art, music, and meaning. Of settling into a way of doing some good for the world around me. Of planting a garden. Of sharing this all with someone. I can't imagine travel not being a huge part of this - but I also can no longer imagine becoming one of the people I often run into on the road, people who've spent 20 or 40 years in a series of dingy foreign bars.

West Africa wasn't going anywhere. Lauren quite possibly was. So when I finally screwed up my courage at a Mauritanian internet cafe and wrote to tell her how I felt, I quite honestly said that building our life together, not wandering around global back alleys, was what mattered to me. I said it, I meant it, and I mean it even more so now - but I don't think I could have said it honestly without spending some time away first. It's a pretty damn expensive way of making important discoveries about my life, but there's not much I can do about that!

In any case, waiting for her reply, I was still a big ball of nervous. I think I wore a couple new grooves into the Nouakchott streets, and puffed more than a healthy amount of hookah at the corner cafes. Since I'm writing this post, I think you can probably gather that the answer I got was a good one. A very, very good one.

There was still, of course, the question of what exactly we should do about it. Those thousands of miles were still there. I was willing to come home right then and there, but I won't lie and say that that was on the top of my list. I asked Lauren if she might want to come join me out here, and to my utter joy, she started to think about it. First of all, though, we had to wait a little, to try this whole thing on for size, to realize how much each of us had been restraining ourselves for the sake of the other. We needed to see whether we could take being apart, and if so, for how long.

There was a mighty barrage of emails, but it swiftly became clear that that just wasn't going to do it. Off I bounced to a little corner store in Senegal, and returned with a cell phone. International calls from African lines are wonderfully cheap, and there have only been a couple evenings since then that we haven't spoken. Without this little gadget, I would have been on a plane long ago. With it, we fell into a rhythm that both of us get a lot out of, and we were able to start thinking of the next few months.

I started this post talking about December 30th, 2009. Now I think I can explain why I'm so excited about it. On that day, I'll be picking Lauren up at the airport in Bamako, Mali, where we'll spend 3.5 weeks travelling. Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.

You have to understand why this is so special for me. It isn't just because I'll be seeing the woman I love for the first time in 8 months (though that would be enough!). It isn't just because she was completely excited to jump on the West Africa shoestring travel express with me. It's also because Mali is perhaps the longest-running daydream of all my travel dreams. Holy crap, indeed.

Mali and our plans for it deserve a separate post. Both Lauren and I, though, found ourselves caught by the guidebook's section introducing Malian culture, and particularly its last line:

"Above all, Malians are a deeply optimistic people who love to dance. They love it even more if you dance with them"

A more fitting place to go, I cannot think of . Nor anyone else I would want to go there with. Of course, there is still a long while between now and then (11 weeks - trust me, we're counting), and beingapart is far from easy. I started out thinking that it would be harder for Lauren - who is still in K-W, amongst our shared friends, having lots of experiences that we used to share - then it would be for me, but I'm no longer so sure of that.

If there's one single foundation to my relationship with Lauren, it's the shared joy we take at the discovery of all the beauty in the world around us. Well, what else do I do with my days than spend them doing just that? Not being able to share more than a small portion of it properly over the phone is incredibly frustrating sometimes.

We definitely have our days when it's rough. But by and large, we get by. Indeed, just because "absence makes the heart grow fonder" is a trite expression doesn't make it any less true. I'd like to think that it's not just deprivation, but also the chance to step back and think about just how and how much a future with someone makes you happy. Not bad.

In any case, both of us have certainly built up a long list of things to say to each other, long enough that I'm cheerfully worried that all the long hours on buses (and camels, and out in the Sahara!!) won't nearly be enough to get through 8 months of accumulated beauty. But such problems, I'm glad to have.

I think the title of this post actually expresses how I feel about life right now a good bit better than all these paragraphs:

WHEE!!