A Traveler’s Love Letter

 

Sometimes words fail me at a time like this when emotions are simply too blinding to be contained by mere syllables. You have lit up my life like a shooting star that dazzles the darkest of nights and holds all the promise and whimsy of the world. I have traveled throughout South America, kayaked with orca whales in Canada, climbed the Mayan ruins in Mexico, tasted chocolate with local tribes in Panama, sipped absinthe in Spain, snowboarded in Serbia and sailed down the Seine in Paris-but of all I’ve seen and all I will see what we have is by far the most beautiful. To find you in a city that is at once my lighthouse and albatross is beyond poetic; to find you at a time when my life was in flux was telling; to find you in so serendipitous a way is magical. Any arbitrary turning along the way and my life would have been different; I would have been different. Yet, here I sit shamelessly letting my emotions flow through my fingers as I watch the sunset outside the windows of this charming coffee shop in Astoria.

 

It is often debated over that love and travel do not mix, there is a stigma that surrounds travelers, that labels us as being flight risks leading unconventional lives and always itching to change location. Perhaps it’s true, but then I found you and every notion of having to choose travel or love shattered. To fall in love with you each day doesn’t come at the cost of my freedom, to grow together and build a life doesn’t clip my wings, to runaway with wanderlust and trip ideas doesn’t cause arguments because you celebrate my passions as much as I do yours.

 

Both artists, both complex, both inquisitive and thirsty for life, indifferent to societal expectations of succcess opting instead to make our own definition. Both dark yet light, brooding yet easy going; a sense of allure and mystery shrouds this love and makes it irrestible, makes it a force to be reckon with. I ran from happily ever after, had felt suffocated by the looming promise of suburbia and that telling “white picket fence,” had figured that the day I say “I do” would be the day I hung up my camera bag, packed away my passport and settled for a life of one week family vacations in Ft. Lauderdaule. Then I met you, my match in seemingly every way and the man that I am excited to wake up to each morning, who I cannot wait to spend my life with and know that I can love irrevocably without giving up my passion of globetrotting. When I was younger, my dad would play this gorgeous Spanish love song to me and translate the words as they rang out loud over his car speaker:

 

Querer
Y poder compartir
Nuestra sed de vivir
El regalo que nos da el amor
Es la vida

 

He would sing the lyrics about love and passion, about loving someone with such intensity-without gravity, between the sky and sea-so that you feel weightless and free. He would sing about a love where you shared your thirst for adventure together, your thirst of life-that this was love’s gift to us. It’s a song I would later memorize the words to, would sing in the shower, play in my own car one day and hope to find a love like that described in the song. Then I found you. With you I promise to share my thirst of life and give you the world; to never take for granted our love for what we have is the rarest and most beautiful thing-I should know, I’ve traveled the world searching.