I’ve tried, at times, to count how many human beings I have truly interacted with in my short lifetime. Besides those who I’ve ordered a burger from, picked up my dry cleaning from, or simply said “Excuse me,” to on the street, the amount of people who I would consider acquaintances, including classmates, coworkers, family members, drinking buddies, ex-people-I’ve-been-in-love-with-for-one-fleeting-day, and my mom number in the thousands.
When you have traversed oceans, passport in hand, these acquaintances and friends become global. While they may be a quick phone call away due to amazing advances in technology, it’s not like they can just meet you at the movies or for dinner after work. And while more amazing technology gives us the chance to travel great distances back to those who we miss greatly, the sad fact is that a ride on an airplane is expensive and affording more than an annual flight is almost impossible for the average Joe, especially in this economy.
Random boating kids on a river in the Balkans.
The whole point of this website is to motivate you to travel, but I’m going to have to ruin your next hour with the sad but very true reality: if you go abroad, you will meet amazing people that you will never see again. You may see the occasional Facebook post years later of your friend’s marriage to some woman in their country, you may wonder just how pregnant that girl you met a decade ago in rural Italy must be right now having not heard from her since, you may hope that one cool guy remembers the time you did him a huge favor and slept in a hammock so that he could get the hostel room to himself and the girl he met at the club in Rio, but the fact is, you both will never breathe the same air until the day that you die.
That may sound sad, but think about how much worse it was in centuries past. Girls saw off their beloved as they went off to find their fortunes, cherishing the last image that penetrated their cornea as their object of affection took off on their horse, gradually falling into a seam of the earth, right where the trees met the horizon.
Thankfully, now we have Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, Voxer, and the list goes on. We are available to have a decent amount of contact with each other at a moment’s notice. However, these relatively recent technologies, even the telephone which has been with us for at least 6 generations, have had a truly minute impact on our genetic memory. Much as salmon know to swim up streams and have been doing so for millennia, our ability to fathom the great distances that separate us from our loved ones, never to lay eyes on them again, this ability which remained unchanged over thousands of years, is still ingrained in us. Knowing that the same sunlight won’t warm our skin, or that the stars look differently than for them still causes a pain equal to that of an Athenian saying goodbye to his brother before people even knew what zero was.
I learned this waking up from an uncomfortable nap with my head propped on an armrest in a minibus, my T-shirt absolutely soaked. The liquid in which I was drenched was not sweat, but the tears of the girl who had sobbed horrifically into my chest, begging me not to leave. I had known that she was enamored of me several countries back, where we met spending humid nights on patios, discussing politics and the recent guerilla war in her country, picking off cigarettes one by one like a sniper hiding out in a bombed out apartment building.
Yet having visited her in her hometown, meeting and dining with her family, and spending that very afternoon with her and her friends, swimming in river water and roasting a whole pig over coals while our brain cells scuba dived in beer apparently gave her the courage to unload the deep-seated agony from the darkest corners of her insides, as she clutched her ear to my ribcage, certain of never being able to hear my heartbeat after this moment. Poignant to say the least, and if I wasn’t shit-faced, I might have felt as depressed as her.
Tirana, Albania
But eventually, as some love song has to say, “I’m sorry, but I have to go.” As my next stop was Albania, a country about which I had heard many bad rumors, my uneasiness (and my state of inebriation) was numbing my ability to be sad. Only as I awoke did I contemplate the friends I had made and left, unaware of the obvious, moist T-shirt-y foreshadowing that was currently clinging to my chest and stomach.
These bunkers are everywhere, built to defend Albania from the Capitalist West
The very next day, I was sitting in a tourist bus surrounded by British and German jetsetters. I sat in the back corner, and didn’t talk to anyone. Who cares? They were all so preoccupied with comparing each other’s reddish tans than talking to strangers, and since my melancholy over leaving that little town had consumed me full-keel, I probably didn’t look very friendly. We were all set to head down to Tirana, and had stopped to take pictures with a Mother Teresa statue (she was an ethnic Albanian, but in terms of Albanian descent, I’ll take Eliza Dushku thank you very much).
The best way to dispose of trash…
Not wanting to talk to these snobby Westerners, I peered out the window at the overcast day. A small group of Albanians were amassing directly outside. My eyes glued on them as quickly as a fruit fly hitting flypaper because in their faces, I read the exact same feeling I was experiencing.
This is supposedly a Third World country?
Clearly this was a family saying goodbye to their son, and given their slow-onset sorrow, they were coming to a realization like snails at the end of their lives, approaching the other end of a sidewalk square of cement that had taken an eternity to traverse, the same realization which for me towering overhead had taken but a footstep, a quick second. The sadness built and built, reaching a lachrymose climax. But eventually, like with impending doom, acceptance took hold as the end grew nigh, and every independent group including me in this weird metaphor knew it was time to let go.
Utter sadness on a sunny day.
Our bus initiated its journey just as he walked away from his tight-knit family unit, as I resolved to do as he was and trudge on. Years have passed, and the soles of his feet have surely tapped the sidewalks of his hometown, scraping through the Mediterranean soils of his Balkan homeland. Mine haven’t since.
Lesson learned: Goodbyes suck. That’s it, nothing better to say here.
–Greg, (26), San Francisco, CA, creeping on lamenting strangers in Shkoder, Albania