Kaki King - Doing the Wrong Thing: youtube.com/watch?v=4PaWKB1ubqc
This song is a driving song.
I love movement; the intensity of change that occurs when you’re traveling is wonderful. You wake up in one city, meet new people in another, wake up there and move. You experience lifetimes, sometimes, in a matter of hours, days pass and they seem like they happened weeks before. You see newness every minute.
I don’t know where this wanderlust occurred in my life. I had a conversation with a friend once who told me that he spent his whole development moving from country to country, having to learn new languages and meet new friends and settle just to move away. He said he hated it. I envied him a little. I spent my development in a small town, never seeing much of what is outside but to go to Disney World, once, or my Aunts house in Ottawa. I knew the same few hundred people for 18 years, never really diverging from them. That’s not to say that my development was bad, far from it, but it made me want for change stronger and stronger as I grew.
I once went on a cruise with my parents, when I was 13. We flew down to Florida and got on a boat that brought us to Nassau and back within 4 days. At 13 I was, admittedly, in a pretty bad state. I had little to no self-confidence, I was kind and that was seen as weakness by my peers so I was an easy target. Going on this cruise, to me, felt like an opportunity to meet those my age and find real friends. And I met those my age but it was all in retrospect a bit of a lie.
There was a small group from the American mid-west who tolerated me enough to let me be with them for those 4 days. I don’t remember any of their names but there were 2 guys who were about 16 or so and 3 girls who were between 14 and 16. In retrospect they were all pretty shitty people who were vain and self-destructive, had horrible taste in everything but I didn’t much care because these were my new friends and I was being taken in. I remember they all loved that song “Pony” by Ginuine.
On this same boat were 2 girls, whose names I also can’t remember, who befriended me briefly. One was a beautiful girl of 13 who had long straight, brown hair and a very sweet smile and she made me nervous. She had an older sister, maybe 16 years old, with very curly black hair and a round face. They were very kind to me. On the second night they invited me to their room, which I obliged of course, and we sat talking for hours. I don’t remember of what though I’m sure we exchanged histories, talked about common teenage things like where we lived, where we went to school and the things we liked. There was a moment in the conversation, though, that I still remember very vividly. The older sister told me that where they came from they were teased and people called them kikes. She explained to me that they were Jewish and what kike meant and said that sometimes they would just get home from school and cry from it all. The beautiful young sister, I remember, just looked down at her feet and stayed quiet, nodding her head every so often.
This stayed with me for one reason in particular: The group that had befriended me hated the two Jewish girls. I don’t know why but I was told not to be seen with them. And I remember being with this group on our third night, passing the two Jewish sisters in the hall and avoiding eye contact. I don’t think I saw them again after that.
What holds me about this is that aside from turning away from beauty at that moment I also turned on myself. I was being dragged into this group of terrible people because, back home, I wanted to be part of that group of terrible people. Maybe because they tortured me. Those two girls were closer to kin that anyone at that time and I turned against them because I hated myself so why shouldn’t I hate them too? But I loved them and should have been at their side. They were sorrowful and beautiful and I miss them.
But aside from all that, this is part of the nature of traveling that I revel in; because you may never see these people again you are given just one chance so you God damn better make sure you do right by it. It makes for an intensely honest and good human being. When one is given a day to get to know another and fully for this is it, you make it right. Or at least I try to now, in movement.
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