No Expectations

"Take me to the station
And put me on a train
I've got no expectations
To pass through here again
Once I was a rich man and
Now I am so poor
But never in my sweet short life
Have I felt like this before
Your heart is like a diamond
You throw your pearls at swine
And as I watch you leaving me
You pack my peace of mind
Our love was like the water
That splashes on a stone
Our love is like our music
Its here, and then its gone
So take me to the airport
And put me on a plane
I got no expectations
To pass through here again"

- The Rolling Stones









The amount of patronage that comes with travel writing makes me incredibly self-conscious about what I do and do not say. Some writers display their words like trophies, confusing their own agenda with the makings of a good story. Most of the time no one gives a rat's ass. That’s where most travel writing fails. Oh Dear. I know these pages (if printed) will become haughty, self-fulfilling, pieces of shit collecting dust on the mantelpiece one day. The 15 minutes it took me to write that sentence adheres to my reluctance towards writing in general. Some stuff should simply remain unwritten, so, uh, pardon the esotericism? But herein lies the problem: I have a lot to say and I want to be candid. Not that I think I’m any good at synthesizing all my experiences into mere sentences. I just want to share. So what’s a girl to do?

This is a question I asked myself the last few nights aboard the ship. I was overwhelmed with such a sense of good fortune that I felt with every breath I took, the world in its entirety might come crashing into my lungs, choking me to death.

The last few nights aboard the ship, I hardly slept. In my most delirious state, I was chanting “No sleep till Brooklyn” like some hardcore charlatan: "Our manager's crazy - he always smokes dust He's got his own room at the back of the bus Tour around the world - you rock around the clock. Plane to hotel-girls on the jock." (I have no idea how I know the lyrics- the brain is a mysterious thing.) But other than the occasional sing-a-long we remained rather mum on our impending exodus.

The last few nights aboard the ship, I was relying on the ship’s crap crack coffee (my patron saint) to maintain balance and function. I wiped my clammy hands on my sweatpants. I couldn’t kick the anxiety. My hands were shaking so much as I tried to pour myself another cup, I spilt that shit down the front of my water colored-stained shirt.

The last few nights I started to question myself. I started to question a pattern of misrepresentation of the non-western world. I started to think about Culture and Imperialism. I started to confront the complex and ongoing relationships between east and west, colonizer and colonized, white and black. I started to self-doubt.

On the last night, it hit us like a ton of bricks: THIS IS IT. Unbelievable. The ship can get under my skin, I thought, but it won’t for much longer, I cried. Despite my edge, I wanted the ship to forever be under my skin like a chunk of lead or ingrown hair or a slab of scar tissue.I got the urge to shove a pencil into my veins like a booster shot, sublimation for the pain I felt as we inched closer and closer to home. Aforementioned, the brain is a mysterious device--especially at sea, where your point of view is determined by the waves and the sky.

We laughed out loud sitting inside the ship and silently wept on the deck chairs, which we arranged in a circle like a dissembling rock band in group therapy. We laughed on the inside and then cried in our beds; we pinballed like this for the next 48 hours. The ending felt like a
riddle
wrapped in a mystery
inside of a train wreck.

The next morning we sat in the sun for five hours and watched as the porters manned the dreaded crane that transported our backpacks and suitcases to the shore. Oh the shore! This is the last place I go, I thought to myself. Where was I going? Our cab ride to the airport hotel was the last. On the trip, cabs and their drivers held potential dramas, the stuff for good story making. As we pulled up to the Sheraton Hotel I didn’t want to get out. Put me under the crane, put me under the cab, I’m a dying wayfarer. I can feel it in every square millimeter of my depths.

I bathed in an American shower for the first time in months. The hot and cold faucets were correctly labeled; the tiny bottles of made-in-china shampoo were perfectly lined on the porcelain tub. My temples hurt from too much sun, then a lack of sun, the crying and the fatigue. We shut the blinds and took a nap. The dying orange sun eventually woke me. I was also hungry but I couldn’t stomach much. (That's what happens when I'm sad.) We bought snacks and I picked at my chips like a bird (That's what happens when I'm sad.)

Outside, the balmy night air was so cloying, sickly sweet, I almost lost my dinner of Cooler Ranch. I asked the concierge where the closest conveienent store was. “M'am, I strongly advise you not walk these streets at night. They’re not safe.” The streets of Fort Lauderdale, you say? I wanted to tell him I avoided the kidney ring in India, the Yakuza of Tokyo. Hi-ya! I wanted to tell him I wasn’t afraid of Florida.

Colin, Martha and I forged a half mile to the gas station and bought three 40s of OE. We sat knees to knees on the fluffy bed. We flipped through photos. Reminiscing felt preemptive. We listened to Room On Fire on repeat. “The End Has No End” over and over and over again. My face was a Petri dish of sea salt and tear salt and sweat and sunscreen. We made a mess of that room. I felt a mess myself. But everything was in its right place: the shower caps, the Holy Bible, our clothes on the floor and our souvenirs stored deep in our hearts. Lounging on the hotel beds was the kind therapeutic laziness we had come to know well. We curled up into little fetuses and slept like little babies and I dreamt about a now distant reality: the ship.

The last night on the ship, Martha pointed to the sky, “You can see the atmosphere.” This is the zenith, the climax, I thought. The layering night colors were stacked on one another like a birthday cake: green, blue slowly becoming thinner, fading into the rich black star-spangled frosting. It was almost too rich. Should I blow out the candles already or what?

The sweeping trade winds smelt like sawdust, tarnish and cinnamon Toast Crunch. I was desperately trying to cling onto the moments like a manic monkey hugging a tree branch. When one is tired and on the water the mind is a thorny vehicle. Did I already mention this?

The world, as some say, is your oyster. I’ve always felt like this should be a term of reproach but then the meaning dawned on me....

This is perhaps the most clichéd thing I could say now, but I hope I can be charmingly blunt: I felt invincible. I think others did too. I recognize the dangers of an extended adrenaline rush: lemme travel to ungoverned spaces, the breeding grounds for terrorists; lemme make a life out of nothing; gimme a yacht and I’ll host dinners with cabinet members and the bon vivant in our make believe plutocracy; gimme a map and a compass until we sail into the whack of a cyclone.

The water stirs something remarkably disturbing inside. If I could see my reflection in the ocean water, I think I would see myself change as the days change. I had purple bags under my eyes the size of my packed suitcase. The ship was unusually quiet as, to borrow from Thoreau, "The mass of men live lives in quiet desperation." Was this the calm before the storm? Tomorrow there will be a different point of view, I thought.

We said goodbye to Colin. I cried so hard in the airport. I hated being another statistic. Salsa Verde stomach acid bittered my throat. Eating a chili pepper is supposed to release endorphins on the tongue. I wiped my eyes, but I didn’t feel good. Airports can be purgatory: the waiting, the crowds. Martha, the sweetheart, bought us chocolate and soda and I stopped my whining.

I woke up on the airplane to the skyline of Manhattan, the microcosm. I sighed at the beautiful buildings and my own preferences for the spare and the modern. I felt high in many senses of the word. There was sand in my shoes. My hair was standing on all ends. I felt like the cough syrup soothing and seeping my own throat. But my limbic brain throbbed. I should have just beer bonged those 40s back at the hotel. Gimme diabetic shock and some brain damage. I don’t want these feelings! I don’t like it like this! I put on my iPod

"Well we were the people we wanted to know and we're the places we wanted to go," sang Isaac Brock.

Martha and I chased the setting sun all the way back. It felt incredibly allegorical to watch the sunset for four hours. Not only because all my stories end this way, but because I was finally heading west after traveling east for months. Yet I felt as if I was reverting, not soaring, as I inched closer and closer to Portland. I eventually calmed down. I don’t know how or why. But when I did, it was the kind of peace I had strived for my entire life. And when I woke up, I was home.