Wanderlust

Just as I find it baffling and a little absurd to have a favorite or lucky number, I am sure that many do not understand having an affinity or deep love and appreciation of a word. But since words are the only means I have of translating the twisted language of my heart and head to the language of the living, I have a bit of a love affair with language. I tend to develop little crushes on certain words. My crushes are very innocent, nothing serious of course and they usually only last a few days, maybe a week tops. But when I crush, I crush hard. I think about them all day long, remembering the first time I realized their existence. I work them into conversations that have don't really have anything to do with them at all. My heart even beats a little faster when I hear someone else use them both with excitement and also jealousy because after all they are MY words and couldn't possibly mean as much to someone else as they do to me. In time these infatuations end and the other day I barely flinched when someone mentioned Effervescent, a word with whom I shared a few special days last November. However, every once in awhile there is a word that never ceases to delight me. Sometimes I get bored with it, put it up on a shelf and forget about it for awhile. But eventually I always happen upon it again, dust it off and pick up where I left off in our affair. One such word is wanderlust.

Wanderlust is a beautiful word that I've always loved but until now I never really knew what it meant. Or rather, I never knew what it felt like. Wanderlust is defined as a burning desire to travel but it's more than that. It's an insatiable appetite, an unavoidable urge, an unquenchable longing to explore the world. Traveling for me is like scratching at my mosquito bites, it only increases the itch to wander. As I booked my December flight to Paris I felt a rush of adrenaline, of excitement at the fact that I'm actually going but also a greed for more. Why just Paris? I've never been to France before. I want to go to Nice, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille! It seems to me that there are not enough years left in my life to see all the things I want to see, to go all the places I NEED to go. (Or more importantly there are not enough zeros at the end of my bank statement) And while each easy jet confirmation email brings with it the dizzying belief that this can not be real, it also feeds the lust for one more day, one more flight, one more trip. After spending the first 19 years and 52 weeks of my life in one country (my family took a very brief trip to Ireland at some point) I stand to see 14 cities in 6 countries over the next two and a half months, including the beautiful city of Firenze that I currently call home. It is enough to make a wanderer out of anyone. So while in the past I appreciated Wanderlust from afar: staring at it from across the room, testing it out in a whisper while others (more worldly then I) kept it's presence, I now bring it proudly with me wherever I go. This is one crush that is meant to last.