Smitten, Bitten, And Not Forgotten

New England is one of those compound words in nature that I feel inclined to break down into smaller parts. I can thank my Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour mastery theory, specifically in advanced calculus during my freshman year at Penn. After my first college midterm – I received a D – I swapped my wellbeing for studying at all hours, which landed me in the E.R. on more than one occasion. First, I was chronically constipated, then threatened with a leave of absence for anorexia treatment, then later for a severely sprained ankle, a scratched cornea before another midterm, and one especially traumatic experience. I was studying in the makeshift library across from my dorm’s courtyard in pajama pants and flip-flops during the daytime. It wasn’t until 4 am the next morning that I left, only to witness a full-blown blizzard. I slipped and fell, landing squarely on my coccyx. That’s right, my tailbone and the vestige of evolution had slammed on the edge of a concrete stair step. I saw stars, only because my line of sight was vertical, the sky and numbers, both imaginary and not, swirling in my head. I studied so much that I stumped the PhD student adjunct and was academically advised to major in mathematics. I never took a math class again.

New England can be broken down into “new” and “England.” The former is something I do not care for – newness – that inherently identifies with change. I struggle with change, both the phenomenon and the material noun. With regard to the latter, clinging coins cause my compulsive tendencies to come to the surface. I have to organize change in one enclosed place, getting rid of the pennies and strategically keeping the quarters as if they were gold. Neither am I an anglophile. I believe the American Ivy League trumps Oxford and Cambridge. I never had a longing to visit England and bore a revolutionary, patriotic stamp of decolonization doctrine. I am an American and damn proud of it. I cannot understand Queen’s English and the accent is something I understand solely with strained concentration. I have no affinity for the royal family. Yet, New England has had my heart since its inception into my vocabulary.

I traveled to New Hampshire during the last week of August and beginning of the Labor Day weekend in order to displace myself from triggers and potential disordered behaviors what with the close quarters of having family members at home performing in ways that are directly responsible for making my house into a gym. Exercise is triggering. Going up and down the stairs, standing while eating, the free weights and treadmill, they all provoke thoughts of losing weight as an accomplishment and constant goal. I also took off in order to heal my body and mind – to rationally assert that the indoctrinated concept of less body is some how more – was false. It was time for me to pretend that the former was what landed me a D on the midterm that is recovery from anorexia.

Traveling to New England for the fourth time, I had standards. They are proving to be more disappointing than expectations.  Let’s try and parse out why that is. Standards are mandated structural guideposts. Attaining standards is not a viable concept. One is without the mandated standards aside from that which has past associations; there can be no possession thereof. Past associations refers to the benchmarks of experiences lived. These memories are what forms standards. It is not that one cannot attain, but rather \ one cannot meet standards. This means that one fails at meeting a milestone, like a baby not yet forming words or intelligible sounds that could be a language, as we know it to be.

New Hampshire’s motto, “live free or die,” is my truth. I am not free, not free from numbers, mileage, speed, nutritional content, from a reality of an elite education and entrenched standards for employment that keep me out of the workforce. The trip to the “live free or die” state was by definition, not a bout of escapism. Instead, I was hit with a harsh difficult reality, and it is bittersweet.

I was bitten by wanderlust, smitten by the chance of leaving behind so strong triggers that nothing could prevent this whiplash. That which bites, it pains and punctures. That which deflates, can inflate once more. I should know. It has happened before.

The only affirmation I adapted in the last decade or so was that there was a before and there is an after. I stopped typing just beforehand. I had paused at choosing a tense – present progressive or future. I chose the former; I chose to use is instead of will be because of time’s continuity. Before happened already. After, however, is in the making until it becomes a before. The inherent “progress” in the continuity of the progressive adverb is what I believe is a proactive stance on recovery. Progress is to move forward without a specified pace because it is not without hiccups.

The itinerary was full in New Hampshire because every place worth visiting was located a minimum of an hour and a half drive away. Hours were spent in a car. Most of the time, I was uncomfortably cold but also lethargic, fatigued, and bogged down by an endurance athlete-level of activity for several weeks prior to the trip. I found myself horizontal in the backseat, curled into a mature-baby fetal position: too long limbs to curl fully. Born two weeks late, it was only natural that I be in this position anyhow.  

I huddled beneath my parents’ denim jackets, a hoodie, a cardigan, anything to negate the Freon-powered air conditioning. I dozed off here and there, and while I felt lazy, I also felt relieved and rested, on the cusp of a breakthrough – to respect my body once more and not pulverize it into the ground, beneath weight that isn’t my own, and also through runs that exacerbate weight that is my own with each high impact foot hitting the ground. My face began filling out once more and some color returned. This time, however, a pale pallor overtook any rosiness and flush of blood now circulating in a body at rest.

I still felt wildly unsure about progress being made upon returning home. I still knew that there were moving parts, namely, other people pursuing their own actions of their own accord without regard for me, my perception of their actions, their influence, and their affect on me. I found myself counting again: minutes and seconds on the navigational system. In the wee hours of late evening and early morning, I counted the hours left until I could forego my feigned slumber and could take a shower at a respectable time: 3:30 to 4 am depending on the day’s excursions schedule which called for us vacating the inn at 6 am.  

I found myself wanting to return home because I had the quintessential heebie jeebies sleeping on a rollaway bed at an inn – my first experience in an inn and not at a hotel that has places to dine and decompress outside of one’s reserved room, abides by stringent sterility standards, and includes amenities.  Perhaps the cottage-style of the inn in a 17th-century old mansion was all too similar to my home. It was a rustic-chic refurbished room with cathedral ceilings, wooden beams, a fireplace, and a window that overlooked a gazebo. Yet, on the final day, I decided I did not want to come home immediately, becoming paler at the thought of returning to forces extending beyond my control. Forces that reached such a degree, that their collective potency shifted the force of gravity and threw me into the air, without weight, so that I was not grounded and would depend on the mechanism of 5-4-3-2-1, denoting the five senses: 5 things one can see, 4 that one can touch, 3 things one can hear, 2 things one can smell, and that which one can taste. 

I was bitten by wanderlust. I fell into my natural surroundings face forward, downward, upward, but not behind. I would lay on my back in the backseat of the car, looking upward, or down at my feet as I crouched, enshrouded and hunched, a human windbreaker battling the wrath of the worst weather on Earth at Mount Washington, towering 6,288 feet into the air. I looked forward and to the sides, my head cocked like a hobnobbing peacock.

I was bitten perhaps too hard, the air sucked out of me like a balloon no longer knotted. My skin didn’t shrivel, instead it was smooth and soft, supple even, like a waxy balloon and that’s how I know that being smitten and therefore, bitten, isn’t as bad as they say. They – the negative ones – say that having expectations sets you up for disappointment. I guess the diction proves that the positive ones may have some truth when the say that a setback sets you up for a comeback. And that’s what being bitten by wanderlust is: Always wanting to come back – to come back to traveling, to come back to one’s center, somewhere over there, not here, to a new place.