The road we don’t think about travelling.

R.I.P. Britt Lapthorne

Obtuse (and lame) Robert Frost reference aside, the news coverage of Melbourne student, and backpacker, Britt Lapthorne’s disappearance in Dubrovnik, Croatia (and, recently, her death,) has driven home to many young travelers a chilling reality: it could have been me. It’s like a punch in the gut for those of us who can think of one moment (or several) overseas when the night could have gone one of two ways; the way that it did or the way that Britt’s did. My insides twist painfully when I recall one particular night in Italy where I could have dropped off the face of the earth and no one would have been the wiser.

Why am I here when I could be over there?

Tired. May embellish thought process later.

New York, I love you and miss you. And yes, I still dream of you.

Post-Europe-itis

There’s a sickness I have, and it’s difficult to overcome. There’s no cure and it’s hard to manage. I get bouts of withdrawals, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, shivering, and sweating. Then I realise I’m in bed, in Sydney, and I curl up in to foetal position rocking, as I attempt to cry myself to sleep. No one really talks about it much – this sickness. Trying to tell people stories to allay anxieties and withdrawals only garners the rolling of their eyes as they mutter that they don’t really care that this time last month I was caught skinny-dipping in Cinqueterre. It’s called Post-Europe-itis. And each day that rolls in to the next I am slowly recovering.

Gets you through those 4 hour train waits.

It’s funny, really, that my last trip affected me so much. I’ve been on trips overseas before, but I had never hit the withdrawals as hard as after my last one. I’m not quite sure why, but I think a large part of it I can put down to the knowledge that people are still over there. You know, that magical land of 3 Euro cigarette packs and 9 o’clock sunsets. It’s bad enough that I can’t tell a story to people without ending with, “I guess you had to be there,” but that every time I log-in to Facebook the whole flippin’ Newsfeed is an up-to-date bulletin of everyone’s movements, on their wall-to-walls, their photos, their status updates; of those still on the road, those on their way there, those studying abroad, or those you’ve met. All a painful reminder of where you were just a few months ago. What really hits me is that I’m here drowning in all the work I have to do for uni. And in between reading about communications theory I’m clicking on the My Pictures filmstrip of my photos trying to imagine myself back at Roma Centrale, lying on my pack, reading my Kafka, and smoking my fags in front of the Departures board as I await my train to wherever it was that I found myself heading. And a lot of the time I wasn’t really that sure.

Trove: dedicated to my one, true, trove Joel.

I left my heart in Robert Downey Jr's pants.

In a small hotel room in Pisa, after missing our train to La Spezia, and after haggling for a better price for said room, Joel and I were lying in bed talking about stuff. More specifically, falling in love whilst overseas, and whether it was actual attraction or love, or whether the conditions of the situation heightened everything, and put it all on fast forward. It was different to all those random hook-ups you had on your trip. What is this feeling called, we asked ourselves. After a few seconds of silence in the dark, I finally said: Trove. (Three guesses how I came up with that.) Joel replied by laughing hysterically.