“Life is an adventure of our own design, intersected by fate and a series of lucky and unlucky accidents.” (Patti Smith)
There comes a point in one’s life when adventure calls, and the dark brooding nature of that call will not take “no” for an answer.
I felt that call over ten years ago, and it is still so strong that I can feel it in the coolness of my fingertips.
It started with the gentle touch of a stranger’s hand; I held it, she looked at me, and she smiled. It was a smile that somehow knew I was going to be ok, and she told me this silently, solemnly.
It was 2012, she was Patti Smith, and I was alone. After fifteen years of silent decay, I was free, but it took six more years to answer her activation. Even then, it was almost too late. I’d already had enough.
Enough of aloneness, enough of loneliness, enough of life. The cost of what had become an everyday act of heroism, of rebellion and of courage was too much as I fell head-first into my forties. Suddenly, I was husband-less, childless, cat-less and hopeless. I’d tried running away to the country, but instead of comforting nights by the fire, I faced miserable mornings with angry neighbours and a never-ending list of unfinished business.
My restlessness consumed me. Spiders crawled out of my inhospitable state as I slept. Even the rocket bolted.
And so, I threw away the firelighters, and I stopped.
I started with a map: a hand-drawn, badly scaled scrawl with missing continents, but reality didn’t matter so much when I was designing my own future world. Gradually, I covered the map with black ink and crosses. Not x’s, but crucifixes; my own deadly treasure map, marking the final resting places of those that had always been by my side. They gathered slowly, deliberately, in front of me, like lonely ghosts looking for love. Marilyn Monroe spoke to me from my childhood, daring me to dream big. Mary Shelley told me I could love monstrously, intensely, desperately. Emily Bronte pushed me to the top of Wuthering Heights, forever searching for my soul mate, and Ian Curtis quietly convinced me that it was ok to fall out of love.
As I wrote, their names draped over me like one fuzzy comfort blanket – my own fragmented family tree, a patchwork of my existence. My fingers zigzagged across worlds where Sylvia Plath met Nick Drake, Edgar Allan Poe met Jim Morrison and Zelda Fitzgerald met Nico. The more marks I made, the more it made sense. They were calling me, as if my life depended on it. And maybe theirs did too.
I packed my bags – one for summer and one for winter – put everything else in a giant steel box, and I left.
If it seemed crazy to give up life to consume death for a year, it probably was: even the travel agent said it was “a bit schizophrenic”, but by then it was too late… I was already half-way up the Romanian mountains in search of freedom.
It’s a funny kind of madness to think of it now, but there I was, following in the footsteps of heroes, real and unreal. From Twin Peaks to the yellow brick road, I travelled urgently, restlessly, and sometimes hopelessly, in search of something I wasn’t quite sure of. I found the ruby slippers, the lion’s heart and the courage of a tin man; I even found the perfect cherry pie, but, if anything, the call just got louder.
It wasn’t until I broke down in floods of water and tears in the Scottish Borders did I finally admit: I wasn’t searching for adventure, I was searching for love. In some ways, in some places, I even found it: between the cracks of the cobbles in Yorkshire, in the inky twilight of Vienna and in Berlin, running from wild boars at the foot of Devil’s Mountain.
Only when I stopped running, did I realise that the kind of love I was searching for came from the mouths of those I worshipped: they whispered and taunted me with tainted dreams of lost longing, ripe sensuality and unforgettable landscapes of the soul. They told me who I needed to love, but not to question why, and I believed them. The call of the adventure to love, to dare to love, is one that has consumed me for as long as I can remember: the fact that it has not been returned is merely a footnote. I loved to believe in the adventure, and that was all that mattered.
For those twelve months, I left everything familiar, including myself, behind. Instead, I answered the call. I moved through the map of my own desires for over three hundred days and nights. I found graves, I heard peace, I silenced ghosts. I danced in the diner, I ran up the hill, I got lost in the forest, I balled with the dead and I found truth between the tombstones of life.
I answered the call from somewhere deep inside that runs through my body like frozen sand, yearning for the warmth of love; the clarification, the absolute, the necessary.
I have been lucky, and I have been unlucky: and I am still answering that call.