about departures

It’s been almost a year now since I quit my job as a cabin crew.

Two years of a wanderlust finished with a very laud bang: I landed heavily in a well structured society, having a very little knowledge of how does it function and even worse, how on Earth am I going to try and fit in. I quit the cabin crew job because I was exhausted. I was homesick, sleep deprived, I missed my friends and normal, human behaviors. I missed going for a beer, popping in with a cake, I was sick of begging strangers to swap their flights with me so I can go and see my boyfriend.

And so the plan was to be jobless and happy, just for a little while. It appeared to be a reasonable thing to do: take my time, enjoy life, and don’t worry about anything. I knew I worked extremely hard for the last two years, probably too hard for any of my friends or relatives to comprehend, and therefore I knew that I needed some time to recover mentally and physically before starting something new.

But this is not how the capitalist society works, and it is definitely not a plan that could be accepted as a “reasonable” one by anybody functioning in our money driven world.

So what I’d heard for the most of time since I left my job was “WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO NOW?” “WHAT JOB ARE YOU GOING TO GET?” “ARE YOU APPLYING FOR JOBS YET?”

The questions seemed to be coming from each angle, attacking me at the least expected moment and I started getting seriously worried.

I was trying to explain my idea of a frivolous existence, but with each attempt I sounded less and less convincing. The looks of “you should get a job” “you are wasting time” started to feel more and more draining, and the very idea of an easy, simple existence and taking time to figure out things slowly lost it’s own sense in the long, tiring, self explanatory process. The value of the experience, the priceless lesson of wanderlust, independence and curiosity, all that I valued so high, suddenly felt to be completely worthless in the eyes of everybody. I was, first and most importantly, a jobless young person, a serious threat to the society.

And so, the next thing I recall was running for a job interview.

And hey! I got it. A good job, so to say, relatively well paid, a kind of a job that your parents are content with.

And here I am now, not even a year later, handling my resignation form.

Why?

I proved myself I can force myself and function in the society. I can put an alarm clock every morning, and drag myself out of bed. I can get myself to the underground and coexist with all the other sleepy faced people, and with all the sleepy faced people I work with too. We can have a little laugh.

So you see, I can do all these things. I can pay my bills every month and feed myself too.

But there’s one thing I haven’t managed to do, and that thing proved to be essential for my current situation. I haven’t managed to convince myself that this is what life is about. At least not now.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that people work hard out there. Yet I can’t help feeling it’s all a game. A big, capitalist, well manipulated game, where everybody works their asses off, and the winner buys a new, bigger car, and lives in a bigger new house, or in a fancier district. It all feels like a fun game, a big fun joke, sometimes, and I rush to the shop during my lunch break so I can buy myself something fun, a pretty little t shirt or new shoes maybe?

I may, or may not have made a mistake a year ago, letting all the voices convince me that they know better. But I do feel I learnt something and I proved myself something too. I know that I can trust my own voice now.

I’ve decided to quit the society again and embrace the experience. This time, no longer alone, but with love by my side. This time I don’t worry about all the questions. I let them flow.

We’re going to leave the place we called home for almost a year now, and homeless, packed in our big backpacks depart for the big adventure.

What am I going to do next, how am I going to make my money in the future and all these tiring, big people questions, I refuse to answer them now. Pack your bags and come with us. You will be amazed with all the beautiful things it will bring out of you. Live your life. Discover the world, meet the people you share the planet with, learn about it and and keep it . The world is way too fascinating to ever leave it for later.

And am I a little scared?

I guess a little less than I should be. There’s a little voice inside me, it tells me what we’re doing is right. People talk too laud, sometimes I can’t hear myself, I get lost and confused. But this time I have no doubts about who should I listen to.

I feel free again. I feel excited and I feel a lot of different things really, but the point is, I feel. I’m alive. I’m not a robot, not a machine, I’m a free spirit, with a strong desire to observe, to learn, to get lost in the unknown.

and so, I hit the road, again

(or should I say the air?)

About the landing preparations

I dreamt about the San Francisco.
It looked more like New York city encompassed with the dense Hong Kong mist.
It looked like some place that San Francisco is not, but I knew it is,
I tried to take my mother and a dog out to walk a bit around the golden gate, she said no.

Why can’t we go and walk a bit around the golden gate bridge
Why can’t we

My mother was busy, so was my father. Busy was my sister, my cousins, grandparents, aunties, uncles, friends from school, university, kindergarden, the friends I missed and loved.
My dog wasn’t my dog. He looked different, bigger and more polished, and not like my dog at all really.

Come, let’s go see a world, we’re in San Francisco! We are not here forever. We’re only here for a while. How can you know we will not be in a whole new place by tomorrow.

Let’s
go
and
see

But everybody was too busy.

So I took a metro a couple of blocks away from our San Francisco house, the one looking just like in the Mrs. Doubtfire and went to the Golden Gate park. I sat by the river and looked at the tones of red lines and cables, rapid waters of the blue river. There was nobody else just me and the dog that didn’t remind my dog in any way, the endless lines and splots and contextures, the red of it, the metallic.

The intimidating beauty, and the power, and the time, the cold wind smacking my face, tearing my hair, pulling it, ugly, the face of the dog I didn’t know, faithfully smiling to mine

And so I cried

I cried because I have never felt more lonely in my life. I cried because it was me and the powerful intimidating beauty surrounding me from every angle while everybody else was gone. How powerful the world felt by just surrounding me, the world created and remained, forgotten and dismissed.

Everybody else was too busy.
People got to work you know

I dreaded whether they would see what I saw? How I could I know they wouldn’t say

SAN FRANCISCO IS FOR JUNKIES.
YOU NEED MONEY
MONEY IS IMPORTANT
YOU WILL MISS THE MONEY
IT BUYS YOU A BIGGER HOUSE
YOU NEED TO PAY MONEY TO OTHER PEOPLE WHO NEED MORE MONEY TO BUY A BIGGER HOUSE
YOU NEED MORE MONEY
YOU NEED MORE MONEY
WORK
WORK
WORK
WORK
WORK
WORK
WORK
WORK

But I just sat there. I sat on the grass, green minty grass and I felt what I saw with every bit of my soul like I looked at it through a little piece of a pink glass.

*

Two years ago on the sunny friday morning of October I launched the Apollo 13 from the small ugly Warsaw airport. I waved to my family and friends and the love of my life, I pulled the blue pulsating heart out of my bleeding chest, put it inside the big metal, flying Apollo, and launched it. Since I have done it, two years, seven hundred thirty nights and days of comparable length has passed on the planet earth, the third planet from the Sun, the densest planet in the Solar System, the largest of the Solar System’s four terrestrial planets, and the only astronomical object known to accommodate life. My mum, dad, sister, grandma, grandad, aunties and uncles went to bed around seven hundred thirty times and saw around seven hundred thirty sundowns.
I feel like all these days I have been in a different galaxy. I escaped time as I knew it.

I left earth in Sydney on Friday night and I saw it again, twenty hours later, in Dubai on Saturday early morning, just to leave it again with a repacked suitcase to see it again in London
I like going west, because it makes your day last forever. If you drink coke and coffee you can do with it anything you want.
You can get a little cute wrinkle throughout the day.

Can a fly live the day longer than me?
Does it make me the ambassador of the inequality of days and nights?

I’m so lonely
but that’s okay
I shaved my head
and I’m not sad

Some of my beloved friends has fell in love throughout these seven hundred thirty days. I am so happy for them. Some has changed their style and career, moved to another city, broke up with their boyfriends, got a big pretty tattoo, some stopped smoking and finished universities.
I just fly and fly, just ride you know,
keep on rolling like there’s no tomorrow
jump from one island to another, oh what the world is but islands, making passionate love to the Empire State Building in the May sun, in December nights.

I cried when it started raining in Coventry and I couldn’t explain why. I think I cried because it was so beautiful. It sounded so pretty, like little twinkles on the window sill. It felt so clear, so simple and normal, it felt like my soul has been taking a little shower, so I sat down, with my face wet in raindrops and cried.

I saw a grizzly bear. He has been eating a plant on the side of Canadian Highway number one, the longest Highway in Canada. He could kill you with a paw, but he ate the little green plants.
It was beautiful. I couldn’t take my eyes away.

Why do we underestimate the world so badly? Why do we let the system close us in the box, why do we let it make us breath the fake filtrated air and make quick unpassionate love to the computer screens.

It’s beautiful.
It’s wild.

That girl said i want to be like you
And who is that?
Red hat?
Glamorous lifestyle, the big glass doors of the beautiful hotels
London New York Paris oh baby
Tones of make up, red lips, sad eyes

That made me sad.
Can’t you see that’s everything I am not?

I worry my Apollo 13 will crush when touching down. I worry the atmosphere will torn it apart into million pieces, breaking my heart, turning it into something ugly.
I worry I will come back to all the busy people who couldn’t go to the Golden Gate park that day with my arms opened and it will not change a thing. I worry I will leave you, Empire State, to hear no sorry, go by yourself

That go by yourself I dread the most

And so I went

The long story of a backpack from the Chinese street market

I got my backpack for fair traded hundred hong kong dollars on the Chinese market.

It’s close to nothing. It says “Levi’s” inside and “JinTisMao” outside. I find it really cool, the kind of “I’m a badass traveller” cool, so I packed my wallet I got at some local store on omani souq, my big boy camera, passport, a pack of chewable fudge, Cheryl Strayed’s “Wild”, pocket edition of Fitzgerald’s “Great Gatsby” I carry with myself everywhere but never really open, and than me and the Chinese backpack became the closest friends.

Going around the world seems like a fairy tale right from National Geographic, but it kicks you in the ass. World kicks you in the ass. And it’s not just some kind of kick in the ass you get before an exam from a friend, it’s a motherfucking superpower kind of Chuck Norris kick right in the ass. Perhaps doubled. I wear my fancy uniform and smile to people more than I would intend to. I give them a massive check-out-my-teeth smile when they can’t get their meal and get angry, or when I kick them for the fourth time with my cart because there’s not enough space. So it happens and my face momentarily transforms into some kind of double cream birthday cake, which you can’t help but smile to. My silver armour. This is what sometimes I feel I’m becoming. A double cream birthday cake.

I stand on the ridge of Grand Canyon, some safe half meter away from the edge, and I can’t stop looking down, in this massive six thousand feet depth, being protected from it with nothing but my own uncertain sense of balance. This massive hole has been here for some millions of years and there’s been some idiots who fell down there and died because they wanted a cool photo, and some Djangos who shot each other there, and some Pocahontas making out with John Smith too, and this thing has seen all that, and it meant absolutely nothing to it. If I made a single step I would fell right into it and turn into a piece of meat eaten by the birds. Maybe there would be a little note in the news or something of that sort, but that would technically change absolutely nothing beside the daily menu of the canyon birds. Everything that surrounded me in that moment wouldn’t give a single fuck whether I am a cabin crew or a toilet cleaner or a president of the United States, Muslim or Jewish, raw vegetarian etc.

I remember the eighteen years old me having a conversation with my old friend. I don’t quite remember what were we talking about, but I remember me saying it’s all about loosing your ego and him let me know when you’ll find the way to do it.

So I flew sixteen hours and than rode for six more to go to this six thousand feet hole in the ground, sat on its edge just to dangle my legs a little. It has become one of the most significant events in my life.

To travel means nothing and everything. I find the word just as undefined as love, and probably just as fascinating. Where does the journey start? I believe it starts once you’re in the land of unknown and the big fluffy monster called “fear” appears right next to you. The moment when you take this monster by hand and decide to go wherever it takes you, this is the journey. Going out of your comfort zone. And than going out once again. My journey has been about looking for something without quite knowing what was it, and it took to go around the globe twice and another twice and than another one to understand.

What I was looking for was myself.

I was scared more times than I could count on my fingers. I was lost more times than I could remember too. I missed the buses, mistook the metros and walked the wrong directions way too late in the night in the places I have never been to before. I practised looking confident in what I am doing to perfection, just to hide how terrified and lost I am.

Me and dad decided we can’t sleep and went for the night hike to the Griffith Observatory in the North Hollywood. To actually get there with your two legs is quite an effort as most of the road goes almost straight up after what the road peters out leaving you on the sandy path in the complete darkness lighten by nothing but omnipresent night lights of California. On our way back in the late night we got completely lost walking some two miles in the opposite direction. We were left with nothing but two pairs of legs, a pair of brains and a cheap Chinese backpack. We didn’t know the taxi number neither the way to the metro. And you know what? It wasn’t even tiny bit scary. Because after all you got a pair of legs and a brain for the right reason. And once you have your little house right on your back that’s more than you would ever need.

Walking around the globe hand by hand with the old friend called fear I learnt one important thing. I found that sentence in my crumpled copy of Strayed’s “Wild” and it was just right. I realised I was no longer as much loose in the world, as bound to it. The world from the scary, unexplored, big place became the place I belong to. With every other step I feel closer to it, I feel more bound to it. I don’t know when was the very moment when the map on my wall started looking ridiculously inadequate to what it represents. World has nothing to do with the lines and colours. They are far too simple for the amount of blisters and sleepless nights for what it takes to make world feel a little like home.

You may imagine that travelling is sitting on the fancy Californian beaches in your magazine dress and contemplating the sound of the sea while analysing your life and meditating about who you are. I believe it probably is travelling too, but not my travelling. My journey reminds more of lying on that beach with your jetlagged face stuffed with dirty beach sand because an hour ago you literally fell right onto it falling asleep and you probably wouldn’t wake up for the next two days if some kid didn’t shout something next to your ear. Acknowledging that your face doesn’t really remind your face because you’re too tired to hide it under your make up, draining in the forty degrees heat anyway.

Catching up a glimpse of this face in the broken piece of a mirror in a public toilet in the city the name you don’t remember and smiling back to it, that’s travelling. There’s nothing I would rather be than the person in the mirror, you think looking at your watch with a wrong time zone set up. If that takes to go around the globe some sixteen million times to learn that, it is not a bad deal at all.