Spending a lazy Sunday in a coffee shop in the unglamorous side of Kuala Lumpur (nope, no Petronas Tower in sight from where we are). It's the last day of our trip, and we're just killing (a lot of) time before our flight back to Manila at 11 pm later. It's cloudy today, and the gloomy weather coupled with the gray concrete-ness of our surroundings remind me of many of my Sundays from when I still went to university. Pearl Drive, the street where my school and dorm were located, would be a virtual ghost town on Sundays. I'd spend hours at one of the neighborhood coffee shops studying, reading a book or listening to music. It sounds like sad memories, but they weren't really. Living alone in the city teaches you a lot of things.
I really love to travel, no question about that. I don't find it at all difficult to pack my bags, book a flight, and just go. I enjoy spending days when my life is contained in a few bags in a strange new place that's so different from what I'm used to, but somehow manages to remind me of home too. It's a strange kind of freedom that I embrace wholeheartedly every chance I get - it scares me sometimes, how I'm so attracted to this kind of freedom, how I don't fear it at all. Because then, what of the days when I go back to my real life? What does this say about how I feel about most of my days and weeks and months, all spent trying to build a "life" - being able to buy a nice comfortable home, sticking to a daily routine that works so I can keep my schedule organized and all my tasks done, building a steady career to keep me financially stable? And which is my real life to begin with? Or are both versions of my life real? In which case, will I need to pick one? Or can I keep doing this, moving back and forth, because I think it's pretty clear to me now that traveling for me isn't just what it is for most people - it's not just about being able to get away for a couple of days to have a good time. Even if I don't know how or why it is the case, I think it's pretty obvious that the art of travel has so much more meaning to me. It's both a gift and a curse I guess, and most days I think it's the former, but today...today is strange.
Maybe I was a wandering free spirit in a past life, who lived La Vie Boheme in a time and a place in the world when that didn't mean running the risk of death by starvation. Maybe, as John Mayer aptly puts it, "It might be a quarter life crisis, or just a stirring in my soul". Maybe I shouldn't have listened to Fiona Apple's "Tidal" today (I didn't have the benefit of emo culture growing up, so I survived my teen years listening to Fiona Apple's poetry in "Tidal", among other things).
I'm flying home tonight, and maybe I should have just stuck to my cheesy, forever-happy KPop playlist.
