codenamewanderlust | LJ Idol Week 2: The Missing Stair

The first time you don’t so much as fall as you trade one staircase for another.

You finish college. You decide you hate living in your hometown. You buy a one way bus ticket to the other side of the country and leave everything behind.

You fall in love and work hard.

You think nothing could go wrong now.

But you don’t get very far before you slip and bang your chin and people are telling you to get out of the way and you have to brush the dirt off your knees and start climbing the stairs again.

You get your heart broken, you move out in the middle of the night and you cry yourself to sleep for a year.

You get over it. You work even harder and move into a nice neighborhood and you think,

This is it! I’m going to make it.

You get so focused on reaching the top that it comes as a total surprise when you lose your footing and then you’re falling again. You miss a step entirely and tumble so far down you find yourself sprawled out on the asphalt and thinking you’re just lucky you didn't break anything this time and the bruises will fade but meanwhile your pocket change is spiraling away and your wallet pictures are caught in the wind and you've cracked the screen on that phone you saved months for.

You lose your job and end up selling all of your possessions for a grand total of eighty bucks and start living out of a backpacking bag that you found abandoned in a closet at a punk house crash pad.

You cycle through your friends couches but don’t want to be a burden to anyone and it still aches in your bones every time they bring up the stairs.

How many jobs did you apply to today?

You steal a tent and hitchhike to the pacific northwest.

You learn to travel light and don’t even have a wallet anymore.

Because what would you keep in it anyway?

You had to close your bank account.

And you never really liked cell phones.

And suddenly you’re living off the grid.

You change your name.

You redefine words like homeless and tramp and write the word Wanderlust on your skin.

You meet train hoppers and self proclaimed hobos and traveling minstrels.

Water becomes nectar.

Even water that’s been sitting in a jug under the hot sun for an entire day.

And you wonder why you ever complained about not drinking enough water.

You start practicing a new religion.

You become grateful for everything and you make up a prayer for every time you find a warm safe place to sleep and another one to say over food.

Thank you for this blessing the universe has provided.

And eventually you give up searching for the stairs.

But you survive.

Somehow.

You feel like you’re forgetting something when you’re brushing your teeth in a coffee shop bathroom in New Orleans and taking a shower at 2am in a truck stop in Alabama.

Because how the fuck did you get to Alabama?

But it doesn't matter.

Because hey, when was the last time you looked at a clock instead of looking up at the sky?

Time is a man-made concept anyway, man.

Crazy?

Yeah maybe, but that’s secondary.

You’re hungry and hallucinating but you’re free.

Survival is totally mental. It’s an epiphany.

If you can survive this you can live through anything!

So you volunteer to be the one to hitchhike to the next town to get diesel in the middle of the night when the converted hippie van you stowed away on breaks down on the side of a two lane desert highway in southeastern Texas and get to meet Saint Juan of Del Rio who even gives you a ride back to the van and tells you that you shouldn’t be here.

“Mira,” he says, “go home, find work, find a nice young man and get married.”

“Si, si, puede,” you say.

But really you mean:

“The Road is my home now.”

And your mother has been divorced twice…

You can’t even find the stairs to start climbing again if you wanted to.

You get in touch with long lost relatives who offer to help.

It’s like something out of a movie.

You end up back on the stairs and stop praying and start taking things for granted again.

After a while you threaten to throw yourself down the stairs on purpose this time out of sheer boredom and take another bus trip across the country instead.

You promise your grandmother you won’t hitchhike again and send her postcards from California.

You rent a little room with a soft bed and buy a new cell phone and wonder how you ever lived without it.

You stop focusing on reaching the top and you watch your step but don’t worry about falling anymore because even if you did it would only hurt your pride this time and you’ll adapt because it's what you've become best at and Sisyphus has nothing on you.