Two Rivers through the USA

Two Rivers through the USA

I was in a bad place recently, a bad place of the kind you can’t get to by plane or leave a bad Yelp review for. There was a Sylvia Plath quote I kept repeating to myself (can you ever be in a good place if you’re quoting Plath?): “Is there no way out of the mind?” No, ma’am, there are no flights in or out. There’s no chance of chartering a bus or hailing a cab. You’re stranded at the airport and you’re alone in there, with not even an overpriced soda for comfort. I had nothing to do but ask myself, “Is there no way out? Is there no way out?” and I’ll tell you now that though there’s no way out there’s definitely a way of altering the view.

I figured this out after boarding an actual factual airplane and landing in New Orleans. I was there for a long weekend to attend a friend’s wedding and I had spent the weeks before the trip agonizing over these three days, roiling in anxiety, purely because leaving – even for this short amount of time – meant change. In the bad place I was in one of my few comforts was routine and this interrupted that. I stepped off the airplane resigned to counting down the hours before my return flight, but it would be days before I even thought of home.

There was something in the air, I think, something very like luck – or love. I was with friends I hadn’t seen in a while and our reconnection was as effortless and unintentional as the way we were always indoors when the downpours began. We watched the deluge from the bars and fried chicken restaurants on Bourbon Street, our neon colored drinks beading with sweat, the chicken devoured before it could cool from hot to warm, the sound of our own laughter distracting us from the wall of humidity pressing in from outside. It felt, to me, that we laughed that entire trip, from the first midnight when we went down to the Mississippi to see its dark waters up close, to our last night in town when we went on a ghost tour, the sky going black as we entered the French Quarter, the gas lamps flickering in perfect countermelody to all the ghost stories we heard. Some moments in life become significant even as they’re still occurring, and as I wandered from haunt to haunt that night, in the final hours of this trip, I knew that this was one of those moments. Because it was then that I realized that it was possible for me to get out of my bad place. All I had to do, I saw now, was invite change rather than refuse it.

For over a year I had had an idea of the kind that resembles a diet: an idea that would be good for me, but that would be difficult to see through. My idea was to abandon my beloved – but undoubtedly entrapping – routine and move overseas. It was something I had wanted to do for years, but the emotional effort involved seemed too much to handle. So I kept putting it off and putting it off – until New Orleans, when I laughed and laughed and knew that this was something I needed to do.

It’s a hard thing to fight against one of the most fundamental aspects of your nature, harder still when you’ve let it hold you down for so long. It would’ve been so much easier to sink back into complacency, to let what I’d realized in New Orleans fade into just another fond memory from the trip. All I had to do was forget how much my friends and I had laughed together. All I had to do was forget how happy I’d felt.

I chose, instead, to remember.

Maybe booking a one way flight to a beautiful, cobblestone-laden city doesn’t seem like bravery, but it sure as hell felt like it. I fought myself at every turn. I was depressed at the prospect of leaving for months. But now, I’m writing this from Prague, from an apartment – nay, a flat! – two minutes from the Vltava and when I look back what I think of isn’t the burden of the depression or the anxiety that was the prelude to my arrival here. Instead, what I remember is another city with a river winding near it. I remember a day when the air held its own weight, when I could scarcely breathe for all the rain. I remember that I said, “I’m thinking of moving to Prague.”

And I remember my friends, each of them on either side of me, saying at almost the exact same moment, “Do it.”

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