Vacat(ion)ing
My relationship to travel is a lot like a manic-depressive’s relationship to life. Sometimes, alone on flights between Iowa and NYC or NYC and LA, I feel shock at my self’s ability to transcend geography, and the shock turns into self-important productivity. I fill my carry-on journals with story ideas and drawings and elaborate lists of life ambitions; and I feel a (fleeting) affinity with the terms used when discussing travel: direction, destination, “taking off,” flight.

But lately, when traveling, I think of Brian Fawcett’s short story “Soul Walker,” which explains the dreariness of airports and the discontent of travelers in terms of the soul’s velocity: while our bodies can travel at the speed at flight, our souls, unprepared by evolution for technology, follow by foot. And so, airports are the site of spiritual zombies, travelers whose souls haven’t yet caught up with them.

By that theory, my soul would have had to walk from Iowa to NYC in three days, and swim from NYC to Italy and back again within seventeen. By foot, it would probably now be approaching Ohio. And I imagine that, like a slow computer, it mindlessly carries out each command (assigned by impatient mouse-clicking) in order, passing me by in NYC on its way to Italy.

Home, Sweet Modem
“Soul Walker” argues that souls are inimical to technology, but if I felt my soul was left behind in Italy, it was, in part, because my laptop was left behind in New York City. The feelings that accompanied journal-writing before my first computer — privacy, relief, the heat of language, the calm of organized ideas — cohered and intensified once I had the ability to not only house my thoughts, but house my journals; a computer centralized my writing and a young feeling of selfhood.

I choose to live my life in words, but only my computer remembers them. My best self-narrative is digital. And, if my ADD feels like constant loss — losing thoughts, appointments, plans for projects — a computer assures the possibility of retrieval. It contracts my existence to a screen — and is self-containment, sub-contracted.

My laptop, I realized while I was without it in Italy, has become a personal metonymy for home and soul ( … or, the house of my soul). I could be homeless, but, with my laptop, still have a place just for myself, where I could feel a sense of privacy.

But how sad is the converse? — That a broken laptop could make me feel so alone and homeless.