Tomorrow I fly to Germany. A fantasy come true and yet....
It was not without trepidation. I hadn't been to Europe in fourteen years and had entirely misplaced the travel confidence I wore so well in that long-ago trip to Italy.
A nervy fear of monetary exchange and foreign communication had my pulse racing. I didn’t want to stick out as an American rube on foreign soil. Consoled with the thought that travel is anonymous, I surmised it was unlikely I would befriend anyone. So perhaps bumbling once or twice and moving on could work. I argued back and forth with myself, as if there were any serious doubt that I would accept an airline ticket to Germany.
In my apartment, I practiced counting, adding, multiplying and dividing Deutschmarks. Germany, like other countries in 2000, flirted with the Euro but was still using its own currency. I studied German and French phrasebooks. The plan: Start with hello, goodbye, please and thank you. Then move on to rudimentary sentences, and after that resort to drawing pictures or acting out as if in a game of charades.
As much as I wanted to go, I delayed the packing process. Pacing my bedroom and eyeing my empty bag didn't help. Packing for a weekend, let alone a month, frustrated me. I opened and shut drawers, stared in the closet and decided the antidote to my procrastination was to pack minimally.
I came up with a uniform. By eliminating choice, I'd never have to wonder what to wear and one bag would do. I decided on two pairs of corduroy pants, one black, one beige. Two pairs of walking shoes bought at a place called something like The Walking Shoe Store. A black cardigan, two white cotton turtlenecks, two white T-shirts, a gray sweater and a beige sweater. Socks, underwear and a bottle of Woolite. I could hand-wash along the way.
My flight path was Los Angeles to Paris, for a seven-hour layover before continuing on to Berlin. However, a bumpier flight path concerned me. I sat down on the bed next to my packed bag. Spencer dozed, a breeze rustled through branches outside the bedroom window of my apartment and I knew that as ready as I was, I wasn't.
This trip and my racing heart had less to do with concerns of language and money exchange than the precipice I was teetering above. My life was about to be altered. I didn't know the details, but something was afoot. My heart knew this well before my head caught on.
William owned a California cottage twenty miles across town, on the Westside of Los Angeles, and I lived on the east side in an old-fashioned, light-filled apartment with a cat and my stuff.
Two years into this and I was gettin' itchy. Still in love with the man, still laughing and carousing but...scratchy and fussy. I wanted to wriggle out of it. I'd never, ever made it longer than three and a half years in any marriage or romantic relationship. The time frame was natural for me: three and a half years and not a minute more.
Yet here I was, about to embark on a trip across the world to find him. William was already in Berlin. He'd been working there for a month. Up to this point in our two-year love affair, we'd only ventured away on one weekend, to Santa Barbara. That was the sum total of our travel together, and anyone who has ever journeyed with anyone — relative, friend, lover or "it could be somethin' " — knows this:
You find out a lot, fast, on foreign territory.
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