Possibilities

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Other

lost and found
by Jeneen R. Garcia
published in April 2004

In commemoration of the fourth year anniversary of lost & found, I am posting the eight essays that were published pre-Multiply. As it happens, these essays are also among my favorites so far :) As you can see in this piece--nothing like a painful break-up to give a fresh perspective on the world ;)


Some people shop and binge. Others drink, smoke or do drugs. I travel.

I don’t exactly know why I’m constantly yearning for departures. As soon as I set foot on home soil my feet are itching and ready to leave again. There’s nothing like the mention of “free travel” to get my spirits up and my adrenaline rushing. The farther away the better, of course. But it hardly matters if it’s the next continent, the next island or the next town, as long as it’s somewhere else.

To keep each new place from fading, meaningless, into the next exploration, I started taking pictures, and turning my travels into feature stories. In a sense, this is the only way I can make sense of—and justify—an ever-mobile existence.

And now I realize: transience isn’t just a habit I can’t kick, it’s my form of escape. It’s how I cope with my fear of getting stuck in a rut. While others want to be immediately transported to another consciousness, I transport my body to another environment to find an altered mind. Travel is more difficult to orchestrate than a drinking session, and more expensive, but I suppose it’s healthier and more effective in the long run.

We all want to get away for one reason or another. Sometimes to forget our current realities. Sometimes just to hear ourselves think, away from the familiar noise. Sometimes for an adventure to break the old routine.

Travel is something I especially look forward to now; the fully booked planes and boats show I’m not the only one with the idea. Maybe as a carry-over from days when “vacation” meant two straight months of doing whatever my heart desired, summer has always been for me about infinite possibilities.

Doors are literally opened as everyone happily joins the tourism caravan. Incidentally, a lot of my free travel happens during summer, too. Guests either coming into our city—or us going out to find people we otherwise wouldn’t meet by staying put—expand our network of neighborhoods across the country and the globe. Along the way we create memories that may be the only colorful snapshots in the gray album of our lives.

Perhaps it’s simply the heat. Familiar sights are transformed into exotic places: drier, more humid, and curiously, more lush. Cities and towns themselves sort of hang loose, move slower and easier, even on a workday. People wear less clothing and reveal more of their hidden selves. For once, they don’t care as much about fitting in, donning personalities they’d always thought were strange to them. And when strange personalities converge at exotic spots, THINGS happen. And I don’t just mean sunburn.

My deepest heartaches have come from possibilities born of summer. But so have the most thrilling, most expansive, most alive feelings I’ve ever felt. The summers of my life have always been an invitation to leap towards a new self, a season to journey both outside and inside, and discover fears and passions and daring that I never knew I had. Also, they’re for healing the pains and aches from last year’s trip.

We live, and many times, we don’t learn. Like a moth to a flame, I embrace each summer with as much fervent anticipation, hopeful every time that this time, I won’t get too burned.