All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft

by Geraldine DeRuiter

That’s the thing about favorite people and favorite places—at one point in your life, they are all uncharted territory. There’s no alchemy that transforms them into the loves of your life. Usually, you just need time to figure it out. They earn your love. And if you are very, very lucky, you might earn theirs.

like that,

My mother, despite all her charming recklessness, imbued in me a deep, debilitating fear of everything. I try not to judge her too harshly for this act.

Fear doesn’t need logic to thrive. Often it does perfectly well without a hint of it. Some of the most illogical people I know are perpetually terrified.

I was not a travel expert. But I could still travel. I could not speak with authority about places, but I could speak with authority about my experiences.

It turned out I was an expert at being me: broken, terrified, and lost. I started writing about what happened when I traveled. All the times I’d been led astray, or ripped off, or rendered a nervous, sobbing mess because I needed a snack and someone’s airplane-approved therapy pet looked at me weird. I wrote about visiting destinations that weren’t really destinations. About hole-in-the-wall restaurants and winding alleys and the poetry written in spray paint on the sides of buildings.

The point is, sometimes you have no idea in what direction you’re headed, but you keep going anyway. Sometimes, miraculously, you end up in the right place. Sometimes it takes you fifteen years to get there, but you make it. And if you don’t? You hop in a cab. If you are lucky, you return with a good story. I used to be petrified of getting lost. I thought it was a sign that I’d failed. I never realized it might be one of my greatest accomplishments.

Dad’s closet is full of several iterations of the exact same shirt, neatly pressed. There is a decent chance my mother is harboring a fugitive in hers.

It turns out, sometimes you just have to accept people for who they are. Trust me, it’s certainly less exhausting. I can spend my time with my dad feeling disappointed, or I can spend it trying to understand the man who was partly responsible for my unlikely existence. It becomes an easy decision when you look at it that way. What is truly remarkable is how very far you will go for that understanding.

We live on a rather densely populated planet—there are lots of people with whom you could potentially share your time. But I think that only a select few of them can help put the disparate pieces of your life perfectly into place. And when that happens, the universe sighs happily, because it, too, has achieved a sort of balance.

And my mother met us there, calm and smiling. All those years she’d spent worrying and instilling that worry in me had an unexpected upside: when shit actually does hit the fan, my mother is the picture of serenity. She is the one person you want in a crisis, because she’s been preparing for it her entire life.

I loved his forearms when he rolled up his sleeves and I loved the way the mood of a room changed when he was around. It was like putting the final piece of a puzzle in place every time he walked in the door. When he was present, nothing was missing.

Turns out, the epiphanies offered up by our experiences are temporary. The secrets that are revealed to you by the stars and the hole in your head begin to fade, and the wonder of being alive more or less goes away. I wish that it didn’t. I wish I had remained forever grateful, forever able to keep things in perspective. But every now and then, I can. I can look at the stars, and for a half second, it all makes sense.

What matters is that you find the right person with whom to spend your time on this earth. Someone who will take care of you when you are sick. Who will love you and the extra hole in your head. Who will drive for hours while you sleep in the passenger seat. Someone who will show you how immense the universe is and still make you feel that you are the brightest thing in the sky. That’s why I don’t have a bucket list. Because I can’t imagine asking the universe for more than that.

sybaritic

Good things happened there. And terrible things happened there. And good things emerged from those terrible things. And now I have a headache.

I didn’t understand that he was drowning. I was just angry at him for not being able to breathe.

jocundity;

Despite all that, the Green Bay Packers may have saved my marriage. I realize the absurdity of that statement, but I know people who credit Ultimate Frisbee with their domestic bliss, who attribute their happiness to Magic: The Gathering or intramural soccer or trivia night at the neighborhood bar. Salvation can be found in the most unlikely places. Like on the stretch of highway between Milwaukee and Lambeau Field.

Rand once told me that you can’t engineer quality time. You can only spend a lot of time with someone and hope that it turns into that. That if you are lucky, something memorable will happen. Our journey out of the dark could have taken place at any point along our travels. Or it might not have happened at all.

And once again, there I was, weirdly comforted by it. Because if Leonardo da Vinci disappoints you, there’s a good chance that you have unreasonable expectations of everything, including yourself.

inexorably

She was small in stature, but because my entire world seemed to move around her, it escaped my notice. In the scope of my life, she was a giant. She made a room warmer just by being in it. She made me believe I had stories worth telling.

I adored her. As I got older, it became an increasing source of anxiety for me. She grew frailer; I knew it wouldn’t last.

People have told me he was a jerk. I remember him letting me press my hands into his hair and squeeze it like a sponge. You love who you love; not everyone else has to.

I was trying to show him what my family was like when I was young. Back when lunch lasted three hours and I spoke Italian effortlessly and my grandparents weren’t simply alive—they were life.

And that’s okay. There are very few moments in our lives when we get to embrace sucking at something. When we get to fail miserably and still find value in it. Travel is one of those things.

Even if you don’t end up where you planned, you still might end up somewhere great.