The idea of getting on a plane terrifies me. But I know I’ll do it again anyway.
While I’ve been having a terrible, terrible case of wanderlust since the spring, I’m terrified at the thought of getting on a flight again. Think about it. Think of the compact space we’re in. Think of the stuffy air and the collision course of energies from other passengers, whether it’s peace, anxiety, anger, or impatience. Think of our proximity to one another.
In low moments during the pandemic, I have asked myself: Will we ever be able to travel freely again? There would have been no way that I could’ve pulled off writing my second book, Wandering in Strange Lands, if I could not travel. To tell the story of my family’s route through the Great Migration, I had to be able to take in the mugginess of the low-country heat, the smell of the rivers in Louisiana, and the miles and miles of acreage in Oklahoma. I had to be in the soil in order to understand the expansiveness of my family history and American history at large.
Travel is a crucial part of my life. Last October, I was teaching literature and creative writing at Leipzig University in Germany and spent every weekend visiting places like Brussels, Zurich, Amsterdam, Cairo, Rome, and Copenhagen. On average, I was on four planes a week, touching the arms of chairs, the entertainment screens, the food trays, the bathroom knobs. Everything. I never had gloves or hand sanitizer with me. I never had a mask. Though the coronavirus was not around late last year, the fact that I didn’t even get so much as a cold from any of these flights stuns me to this day.
I live in New York City, where I’ve been working from home and scrubbing down my groceries since March and where nonessential businesses have only recently started to reopen after months of being shuttered. When I’m stressed, I like to travel. I love to go to a foreign place where no one knows me and I’m unburdened from anyone else’s expectations of what I should and should not do. I work hard to be able to add another stamp to my passport. Vacationing is my form of self-love. I like to flee to locales like the Bahamas or Barcelona, where I can sip a cocktail and people watch at the beach. I had planned on returning to Japan this summer, and now I don’t know when that will be possible.
I began the lockdown with extreme touch starvation. Now I find that I think about touch with more depth and sensitivity than I had before. It’s not only about who’s touching me, but who or what I’m touching as well. I travel to explore, but I also travel to connect and discover. When I travel, I learn so much about myself, like the depths of my courage or limitless taste for adventure. But I also know that freedom of movement doesn’t come easy for a Black American woman like myself. There are dangers both known and unknown wherever I go, so when I return home in one piece, I consider that an accomplishment in and of itself. Now that so much of the world has banned Americans from entering — and rightfully so — I wonder where I’ll go to next when it’s safe, even though I have no idea when that’ll be.
But at least I have time to prepare and to change the way I think about touch. We all have to start thinking more carefully about what it means to travel, and what it means to move our bodies from one part of the world to another.
I’ve been careless over what surfaces I touch when I’m in the midst of traveling, and I won’t be anymore. I’m going to have a mask, gloves, and an arsenal of hand sanitizers. I’m going to wipe down or spray the arms of my chair, the entertainment screen, the trays, the window that I’m going to rest the side of my face on when I nap, the pockets where I’ll take out a magazine to read, the bathroom knob, the bathroom faucet. Hell, I may even wipe down the toilet seat too for good measure.
We can’t forget what travel — even just the anticipation and planning for it — does to our souls, and how much more connected we feel to the rest of the world when we can actually see it. I for one am going to be a much different traveler in a post-pandemic world — but I’m still going to be a traveler.
The Link LonkAugust 20, 2020 at 12:31PM
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Morgan Jerkins on Post-Pandemic Travel | Forge - Forge
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