Love and Travel

There’s something about yearning that links love and travel on a deep level. Setting out on a journey from your home to find a place where you belong; people you connect with, or a way of making sense of the world, and your place in it. The desire for the exotic, to be stimulated and intrigued in ways the familiar doesn’t always provide. The challenge of creating yourself afresh in each new environment and situation. Knowing that you can find food, shelter, and friends, that you are part of a greater human community, that you have something to offer the world. Being seen for who you are, in that moment, without the baggage of your history, past relationships, and emotional expectations. To be totally free and at play in the world, responding to the people who drift into your life each day.

At times absolute freedom brings with it absolute loneliness, and with the ability to simply walk away at any time, there is a certain level of responsibility to tread lightly and move with grace through the world. You never know where the thin ice is, and what hairline cracks you may be setting off with your footsteps.

Maybe I’m addicted to the disorientation of the unfamiliar, and the transformative pain of having my heart broken. Each time it seems to uncover something even more pure and real, the deeper the heartbreak the further along the path of understanding it takes you.

I’ve left fragments of my heart all over the world.

There was the French-Glaswegian VJ who tempted me with a kiss in Helsinki, then didn’t really have any more to offer once I arrived in his hometown, although we became friends. Then the Scottish media artist, a year earlier, also in Helsinki, who captivated me with his mournful dark eyes and poetic soul, and kept me longing for his attention until I realized that he was in love with someone else, and just had that kind of deep soulful gaze as a default setting. I made some nice artwork from that crush, a high-tech mobile wishlist … he’s also a friend. When he came to visit me in Slovakia, as we sat in the thermal baths with snow falling around the 18th-century basilica across the Danube, he turned to me and said ‘You do realize you’re not living a normal life, don’t you?’