TRAVELING SOUTH

This morning, I called a cab at 5:30am to bring me from Federal Way to SEA-TAC airport. Riding in a cab always reminds me of Chiwetel Eijefor, from Dirty Pretty Things, the blurry city life. My cab driver was of dark complexion, and had a thick accent, much like my neighbors in Cambodia, Ahlia and Akram, who were from Pakistan.

For someone who aspires to be creative, the time when I think the clearest is early morning. It’s quiet, and I’m usually exhausted, therefore much more emotional, elegiac, and imaginative.

I’ll start to make up stories about the people around me, the elderly Chinese couple with matching white bucket hats, or the Canadian backpacker with the camouflage pants. Entire stories will be dreamt in my head, about the African man across the row, being, once, a controversial politician in Nairobi, framed and chased out by corrupt government, now forced to work low-paying, lackluster jobs.

While I may not always communicate well with my closest of friends, I am great at conducting small talk with strangers. A woman once, then retired, told me about her previous career as an “interpreter”, where she smuggled Bibles into China. A couple of years back, I sat by a scientist from Poland, who told me all about his research and his favorite places to visit while working: Norway, Casablanca, taking the ferry from Hong Kong to Macau. I can’t remember why I had happened to carry a world map with me, but I remember departing the plane and sitting with him as his guest in the gold room in the next airport, drinking coffee, our fingers tracing the map, souls brimming with wanderlust.

Yet while I’ll occasionally like the person I reinvent for strangers, I hate to travel alone. I hope whomever is bewitched into marrying me, will, when we get the opportunity to see someplace new, be just as excited as I am. Otherwise, I might never be content.