Readingground Blogazine

by Tomi Tsunoda

You road I enter upon and look around, I believe you are not all that is here.
I believe that much unseen is also here…
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you,
You express me better than I can express myself.
-Walt Whitman-

It is 2:26am, and I am going on an adventure. My husband is asleep downstairs, already missing me from the bed, already kicking the covers off himself, already nestling in against them. Whenever I leave town, I come home to a sandbar of blankets scrunched up on my side.

One of the cats peed in my suitcase – luckily before I’d packed it. Also, she’s the one with the kidney failure, so it came out almost pure water. Between the dilution and the vinyl lining, her protest landed like a farting balloon – but it did not go unnoticed, and now I sit here with packed bags, waiting for my taxi, watching her clean the tiny ribcage sticking jagged from her side, and wonder if she’ll hang on until I’m home again.

There’s something about travel that’s just awful for me. Each time is like ripping up roots.

Late one night, when I was pushing 14, my mother ran out the door of her boyfriend’s apartment, where we’d been living. She flew out on the climax of a fight that had been going on while I was lying in bed on the other side of the thin, wood-panel wall. I was playing the same game I’d played with myself while lying in bed through most of my childhood: listing in my head the things I’d try to save if the house caught fire. My mother and I had moved around a lot, and each time my packing list became leaner and quicker to write.

When she ran out the bedroom, I was lying in my t-shirt and undies under a bedspread she’d made for me herself. I’d slept with that bedspread almost as long as I’d had a bed, and it always made the fire list.

I tracked the sound of her footsteps all the way down the stairs and through the kitchen, then heard the kitchen door slam shut. That was the first adrenaline shot. The second was the sound of the car engine turning over in the driveway. I bolted from my bed and tore down the stairs and out through the kitchen and by the time I hit the driveway she’d already begun pulling out toward the road.

I ran down the gravel driveway after her, barefoot and half-naked and screaming at the top of my lungs in sheer panic for her to stop, to come back, and I was prepared to run after her as fast as I could for as far as she could drive.

So much for a fire list. I didn’t even put on pants.

When the car stopped suddenly, I froze in the brake lights unsure what to do next. My mother cracked her door open, and out of the blackness of the car she growled, “Get in.” I did. After several moments of silence, I worked up the courage to ask where we were going. Through gritted teeth, she said she didn’t know. A few silences later, I asked if we were ever going back. She hesitated. She said she didn’t know.

Between the ages of 11 and 23, I changed homes 10 times.

I’ve had anxiety dreams all my life that involve being late for some bus or train or party that’s leaving, and I can’t even get myself dressed, let alone packed, let alone out the door. I stand half-naked in the middle of a room full of scattered laundry, piles of it, everything I pick up and try to wear is dirty, or too small, or ripped, or missing suddenly, or changing as I touch it or disappearing once I put it on, and I feel ashamed that I’m the only one unable to get out the door. Everyone is waiting for me, then leaving without me, until it’s over and clear that I’ve missed whatever it was, then I wake up.

And the fire dreams.

These usually costar my mother and sometimes my sister, and often one of the six cats I’ve been Person to in my life. A room full of family heirlooms, furniture from our childhood home that I haven’t seen since she sold the house, paintings, jewelry, books, antiques, The Bedspread which was long ago lost in one of the moves, artifacts from my life, from my family’s life, the lot of it about to go up in flames, the lot of us about to go up in flames.

And me in the middle of the room, staring at the piles, trying to choose, trying to choose more quickly, trying to find the cat, frozen by the panic until it becomes clear that I’ll save nothing at all, that I’ll be lucky to get myself out alive.

It’s this surreal, drifting disorientation and panic that I remember from childhood when I miss my plane for the first time in my life this morning – the first in 30 years of planes.

It is 7:45am when I arrive in the eerily empty terminal at JFK. My taxi almost took me to LaGuardia and ate half an hour doubling back. I have not yet slept, and have spent over an hour trapped on the AirTram after being misdirected by a Delta employee.

I will board another plane nine hours from now, while a train I’ve booked from Paris to Tours departs without me on it –

– but first I will panic and throw a tantrum in the middle of the deserted Air France terminal. I will reach the wall of reality, and I will slip past it into a panicked dream state, and I will call my husband at work for comfort. I will take his advice from across what feels like oceans, and it will make me feel a little better, if not fully okay. I will stand in line at Delta’s domestic flight counters for one hour, I will rebook my flight. I will take a taxi home, eat eggs, nap, and taxi back to JFK for the next flight out.

And through it all, I will not be able to shake the feeling that I’ve fucked it all up. Left behind, I begin a confused and unharmonious journey of trying to catch up with the life I was supposed to be living, that left without me, that is careening further and further away.

It is literally Of My Worst Nightmares, this anxiety.

Almost exactly another nine hours after the take-off of plane #2, I am sitting in a French taxi, in brain-squelching bumper to bumper traffic, still at least half an hour from the edge of Paris as the second train I’ve booked to Tours departs without me on it. It is 1:50am in NYC, and on my iPod, and in my brain, but it’s rush hour in my taxi. I feel like I’m under water, or under cover, or both. From this moment it will be another hour before I’m apologizing to the one ticket agent at Gare d’Montparnasse who speaks English, three hours before I board a train, five hours before I arrive at my destination: a rehearsal in Tours at 1pm.

I speak no French. I have no cell phone service, and the payphones at Gare d’Montparnasse only take credit cards, and the payphones won’t read my credit card. Once I find the store that sells phone cards, I call my hosts in Tours and apologize for my second missed arrival in as many days.

My next night’s sleep will not begin until after 1am Wednesday morning in Tours. My last night’s sleep ended 8:30am on Sunday in New York City.

I’ve always believed that the universe knows what it’s doing with you. It nudges you down the paths you’re supposed to take, shows you patterns and coincidences to keep you on the right track, and throws up walls and opens up pits on the roads you’re supposed to get off. A hard road is not necessarily a wrong road, but what seems an eerily cursed journey will make any person wonder if it’s time to at least pull over. By the time I board a high-speed train at Gare d’Montparnasse, there have already been several moments when I wondered if I’m not supposed to go on this adventure at all.

I begin to steel myself for further trouble as the relatively familiar city of Paris gets sucked away past my window and the train flies out into the unknown of French countryside. As soon as the buildings disappear and the windows are swallowed with miles of green fields, my stomach lurches like I’ve just taken off on a roller coaster.

Seated across from me are two girls, about 10 or 11 years old. They are trading coloring books, markers, and activity worksheets. They have snacks and drink boxes. The one across from me has carried her guinea pig onto the train in a little carrier. After helping me figure out if I have the window seat or the aisle, she opens the carrier and shows me the pig proudly, until her mother comes aboard and stows him on the luggage rack above the seats. The girl whimpers pitifully about it. During the ride, she glances up at me a lot and smiles openly when I catch her. I find myself doing the same. We are oddities to each other in the best possible way, and can’t help taking in what is both strange and familiar about each other. I want to say goodbye to them when I get off in Tours, but I don’t – they are wrapped up in whatever conversation has them giggling – and just standing to leave I already miss them.

With my scared inner 11-year-old comforted a bit by my train companions, I feel the grip of my pessimism lift as I step onto the platform in Tours. Even though it’s grey and raining and chilly outside, I have finally arrived, and the air feels lighter. I allow myself to hope that once I settle in, the threads of my journey will realign, and I will know if they do, because things will come more easily for me.

Of course as the week comes, things don’t become easier, really, but that was the wrong thing to be hoping for anyway.

When I’m driven up to the theatre by my host at 1pm, I’m met by the warm arms and faces of fellow travelers with similar stories about their adventures. Another colleague from New York is stranded in Spain with an injured foot, and I am not the only one to have missed a flight or to have just arrived in Tours that morning. We all share our stories, then together, jet-lagged, nervous, we all shuffle into the lobby and onto the brink of a collective adventure. We are 50-some artists gathered from around the world to study and explore an art of improvisation. No one is entirely sure what will happen when we walk through the door, and no one is particularly worried about it. Someone makes coffee.

The journey changes. The next 7 days of rehearsals are sloshing full of inspired moments, raw nerves and ruffled feathers, fierce laughter, insecurities, exhaustion, sweat, really good wine, public spectacles, and Beatles sing-alongs. Not necessarily in that order. It’s like summer camp on acid.

The surreal disorientation that began at the Air France terminal in JFK does not fade, and I do not feel realigned with my “intended life,” but then somehow the week I got instead slips inside of me and starts carving tracks of its own, and I start to think maybe the universe didn’t knock me off a course so much as grab me by the scruff of the neck and force me to see a different one.

I’m in Tours less than 48 hours before this drifting sensation becomes familiar in a good way.

I decide one night to go home for a shower before joining the group at a bar we’d been to the night before. I decide to gamble that I can find it again on my own. Twice I am stopped by someone speaking French, and although I don’t really know what they say to me, it seems they are asking for directions.

After about a year and a half of living in Tokyo, my mother moved back to the U.S., and I moved in with an older brother in a different part of the city. On the afternoon we went to check out our new pad – my fifth home – I was able to find the way back to the train station on my own. I had developed a strong sense of pride in being able to find my way around. I would sometimes take the train by myself to the outskirts of the city and go site-seeing alone. The city was packed to overflowing with unturned stones, doorways to thousands upon thousands of years of history. I was twelve. It was an incredible period of my life.

The memory of this kind of adventure in a foreign land is triggered suddenly and vividly for me – new places, new people, exploring the edges of safe boundaries, turning over stones, walking without much to lose, learning the steps of whatever new paths have laid themselves down in front of me.

I reach the main drag in Tours, the one I’m sure leads to the bar on the south bank of the river. I am not sure which direction the river is in, but 50/50 is good odds, and I turn right. It is the wrong way. I find that out because I stumble upon an amazing intersection, lined with giant fountains and colored lights streaming gloriously into the night sky. I know I’ve probably gone the wrong way, but I don’t care. I sit on a park bench next to a fountain and take out a small, folded map, but across from me is a huge, gorgeous stone building dripping with flags. I almost decide to say screw the bar, but I know there is more adventure waiting for me there, so I use the map to confirm what I already suspect, and start out in the opposite direction.

Walking outside at night with my back to these fountains, along a road I find out later is actually a giant outdoor mall, I am feeling twelve years old again, invincible, like I could walk any road anywhere and arrive at some destination I could own. This feeling is the only feeling that after thirty years truly feels like home, and it is the biggest gift my mother ever gave me.

The weather is perfect. Living is perfect. I find myself madly in love with the moment I am living in.

I spend a final night in Paris before flying home, and have some trouble finding my gate at Charles de Gaulle. I secretly hope I will miss my flight and have to stay, but I make it to the gate with time to spare. It is only the guilt of having left my husband for so long already that keeps me from missing the flight on purpose.

And now it’s been 2 weeks and 31 hours since I missed my first plane in New York, and it’s 20:10 in Paris, and in Tours, and in my nose, and on my tongue, and in my fingers when I play the guitar, and in my journal while I’m writing, and in the reawakened romance of my own imagination, and my ass is still settled on the edge of the stone fountain, my ear still turning on someone else’s story, my ankles still turning on the edge of the cobblestone, and my heart is still bubbling with the possibilities of unexpected adventures.

But it’s rush hour on my Manhattan-bound subway, and the smell of heated urine on concrete rises through the open doors at every station. It’s sitting here on the F-train from Brooklyn that something snaps back into place. I feel myself snatched by the ankle and yanked back out of the rabbit hole.

I’m not sure how or why it happens, but the rut of my life finds me here, and I fall into it. This is a moment I’ve been fighting all week, clinging to France in my mind as though the side of me reawakened there could follow me home and stay.

But with each passing station of the familiar commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I feel myself set further into the concrete of this place, into the security and routine of my birth city, an adopted hometown that will always be familiar, and for that reason alone, will never truly be home.

But for now it is the home I’ve made – a home built out of fear, out of weariness, out of a desire to know what roots feel like, twelve years of hard work to systematically eradicate this limbo I’m now missing and clinging to in my daydreams. I’m suddenly a little embarrassed at how easily I could have stayed away, how ready I was to let go of the people and places I’ve spent almost half my life investing in. The ease with which I felt I could make all things familiar disappear once again threatens to melt me toward the panic. Despite my greatest French daydreams, the freedom, the sureness of self, and the love affair with adventure all start to fade and are slowly replaced by guilt.

It’s a slow slide toward security that I’ve been fending off in these six days since I got back. I’ve pushed hard against everything here, refusing to stand face-to-face with whatever I was ready to let go, and I don’t think it’s gone unnoticed by the man waiting patiently for my return.

I feel badly for my husband, who held a kind of bachelor vigil while I was away – shooting meds into the cat everyday; cooking a huge batch of the one thing he knows how to cook and eating it alone every night for a week; sleeping fitfully against the sandbar of sheets, waiting for me to come home from my adventure and slide back into my side of the bed.

Instead I came home homesick.