traveling

Two of my friends are leaving today on trips. One to Italy, one to the California desert. I sigh. I so badly need to go away. Yet I am not sure I could travel alone. I used to do it gladly. I went to Europe solo, with one small backpack, and wandered unabashedly around France; I still remember arriving at the Gare de L'Est, not knowing (or even being concerned about) where I would stay, and walking and walking until I found a small street near the Jardins de Luxembourg (I had arrived in Paris from Luxembourg, where my Icelandair flight had dropped me) and got a room. I was excited and unafraid. In later years I would travel, to San Francisco, other places, by myself. And then on one trip everything changed. After a particularly harrowing sequence of events -- severe illness, a breakup, an assault -- I took another trip to California, alone. And I was, after a few days, gripped by a panic so severe that I could not leave my hotel room and spent my time frantically trying to book an earlier flight back. The hotel was being renovated and while I sat in that small dark room the sound of hammering and drilling, enormously loud, pounded in my head. And yet I could not even muster up the courage to leave and go sit in a café somewhere to escape it. Ever since then I have been fearful of solo travel. But tomorrow I will drive to Philadelphia where I will spend the day with my oldest and best friend and her partner, in their wonderful old stone house by the river. This is hardly like a trip to Italy or the California desert, and I will have Mabel along for company. But it is better than nothing.