I am unsure what to do with my wandering times in my early adult life: the times I wandered aimlessly in some spirit of bohemianism or loss not yet tapped into and acknowledged. I'm not talking about travel, or site-seeing. No; this was stranger, a part of myself that feels somehow detached from myself, and out of character, and dark and lonely.
Once, I got lost in Boston, a city I'd lived in off and on for six years. How does one get lost in such a place? I did, I did. And I am not sure why--I had a place or two to go, nearby. I just perpetually got hooked on disappearing, as though reliving another person's broken adolescence way late in the game. I found one or two beautiful places on these journeys: a park central to Boston, filled with willows and a garden and pond; a traditional Japanese teahouse that served complimentary miso soup and tea. I tried renting an apartment, even knowing I had no money for it, being fresh out of college, and was subsequently turned down late at night, and really, then, I had no where to go. With the meager 100 or so dollars I had on hand I bought a fancy loaf of bread and a large gallon of chocolate milk, sat on a bench near the bus stop closest to the apartment, and ate and drank, calling my mother on the phone trying to form some logical explanation for what I had been doing on my own. As usual when I screw up my rationale, she was the voice of reason. And I don't really remember what happened thereafter; it's a bit blurry. I was met by her at South Station, having wandered around seemingly purposelessly for days, and without sleep, where she picked me up and took me back with her, to New York.
On another occasion, I was in New York, near Chinatown, and as my mother likes to tell it, I "ran away from home." It was more like an attempt at freedom; from what, I don't know, because being in my early twenties, I was already technically "free." My best guess is that I was still in teenager mode, not having lived with my mother long term since before going away to school. I ended up in taxicabs, losing my identification and computer; I ended up in hospitals, looking for rest and health and meals; I ended up in countless fast food establishments and book stores, passing my time, passively, pretending there was no one left to love me after one person showed me they no longer could. Never sleeping, never resting.
My regret is only one in all this wandering, this insanity: hurting my family members by being unreachable, physically, mentally, emotionally.
I recall, though, the beauty: of that large Bostonian park, the Commons, I think it was; of the city itself late at night, virginally silent and dead as though no one had ever set foot there before or, other than me, ever would; The strangers I met, who offered a needed modicum of support and kindness; how everything that I had so tightly knit together, creating for myself a family away from family while in school, of what felt like deep friendships, simply disintegrated and fell apart, like cotton candy dampened. I still don't understand where everyone went when I needed them most, when I was so intentionally lost, wrapped in the fragile gossamer of inexperience. I am admittedly bitter about this failed investment.
And had this piece been a poem, it would've gone something like this:
Boston, 2010.
The summer wind whipped my face with warm air
as I wandered along the alternating paved and cobblestone streets.
There was a tea house with free soup and tea.
There was a park with willows as far as the eye could see.
There were strangers highly interested in me
and why I wandered.
I had a place to go. So eventually I went.
And then there was New York.
A lost wallet in a Chinatown taxicab; a lost laptop.
A failed attempt at filing a police report.
The strangers, the hospitals, the doctors, the bad food,
the fast food, the book stores,
the places that wouldn't hire,
the bohemian aloneness,
so strange that I'd ever glorified it with friends.
Beast Bohemian, why would you dare victimize
me? What did I have that you so desired,
and did you take from me what I then missed:
a solitary faithful friend?
Here, there, you trek and rule
the hearts of the vulnerable, of the lost.
I know not what to do with our danse semi-macabre!
I know not what to do with our tangled absurdity.
I wish I had the capacity, the glue,
to mend the tears in my existence
where I took vacations from my existence
and adopted some stranger's:
strange, broken, weak,
and
willingly lost.
. . . . .
Erika Haines, 2016
