May 25, 2021

purpose

To be 22 again, 3-month visa pasted into a passport, pints of pub beer and wobbly returns
to a youth hostel, happily forgetting what is keeping time back home and instead, wading
into an amnesiac pool smelling of cocoa butter and lemon juice and loose-leaf tobacco,
making temporary friends to chum around with in frayed jeans shorts and tank tops
and having brilliant ideas of going somewhere the guidebooks hadn’t thought to include.

When I picture the girl with her thumb out, walking backward on a road heading who-
knows-where, I fall into the nest of her innocence and daring, the way she barreled on,
trusted something would catch her. A car heading west, say, an empty seat and a chatty teenager
at the wheel. It didn’t matter. She bent toward the sole purpose of adventure and
its sister-in-arms, uncertainty, each beckoning like distant moons, Come closer. Come closer.