“Travel Defined”
Laura Freymiller

I am ten, riding in the back of our mini-van. I am leaning against the window.

Our mini-van is indigo. I love the word indigo because I’m ten and I read the dictionary for fun, but right now I hate it because the sun is merciless and I can feel myself slowly baking in our moving oven.

My sister is sleeping next to me, her head on the pillow in the middle seat between us. We take turns sleeping because there isn’t room for both of us to spread out at the same time. My legs are cramped, so I push them against the back of my brother’s seat. He doesn’t notice. I am the third of four children and used to the lack of notice.

Outside the world is deaf and dumb. It stretches out in endless repetition as only Illinois can. We might have been in the same place we were yesterday, the day before, all our lives. I watch the telephone wires falling and rising with each pole.

If I shift my gaze I am looking at my own face. It is chubby, and recently I got a scar from running into a tree. Good job, me.

Instead I squint my eyes and imagine the world different. I erase the telephone poles, the farmhouses, the fences and cornfields. I evaporate the roads, the cars zipping by us. Finally I disintegrate the mini-van, my family, myself. What is left is the world beneath and behind: rolling prairie filled with coneflowers and the flick of a sparrow’s wing. Somewhere an oak tree spreads above the small and violent life in the undergrowth

My sister snorts and turns in her sleep, and I am back in the mini-van.

#

I am sixteen. It is my first time out of the country. I am in Ireland. On Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands. We have walked up to Dun Aengus, the old fort situated on the very edge of the cliff. The fort is over 300 feet from the water.

It is windy and cold, and I can no longer feel my extremities. Or my face. We have been told to crawl on our bellies if we plan on approaching the cliff edge. The wind is strong enough to pluck you up and drop you into the maw of the ocean below.

I hate heights. Tall chairs are a bit much for me, and Vertigo is a movie I respect not a movie I enjoy. My compatriots laugh and horse around. They crawl towards the edge. I stand and watch, thinking as I usually do. I still read the dictionary for fun. Courage, I remember, is not being unafraid, it is embracing fear, consuming it so that it fills your body and comes out of your skin like sweat.

I drop to my knees and then to my belly. I inch snail-like towards the edge. The rocks are slick with yellow-green moss. It clings to the cliff. I cling to the cliff. I am feet away, now inches, now millimeters.

Now the world drops off and there is nothing but the thunder of wind in my ears, the triumph of hard ground under my body, and the ocean, the ocean, the ocean. It is gray and vast and capped with white waves rushing to their foamy destruction against the shore. I am enveloped in it. There is something beyond the ground to which I press and it is terrible and powerful and beautiful. I am aware again of my feet, my fingers, my stomach, my face.

Slowly, I inch my way back.

#

I am nineteen. I am going to Austria. I do not know it yet, but I am about to meet my first real love.

I meet him in the Leopold Museum. I have heard of him before: my professor spoke highly of him in class, but I never really met him until today. I walk into the austere white building, and there he is, staring at me.

Egon Schiele.

He was born in 1890 and he died in 1918, and in that short span he created hundreds of paintings and thousands of drawings. He altered forever the world of art and the life of one awkward nineteen-year-old. In Schiele’s brief span of time he rebelled against the constraints of the body by contorting them, bending them, stretching them. He turned the transience of flesh into a riot of permanence, and I adore him for it.

I am drawn to him, devoured by him, frustrated and enlightened by him. Have you seen eyes until you have seen his? They are larger than life, slanting and piercing and leaping from the canvas. They transfix me to the floor, and I know that I am bursting and reforming and moving in my stillness. There is red here that is more than red, black that is more than black, and lines sharper than knives that cut me out of myself.

I wander the gallery unable to speak, simply being in love.

I stand in front of the painting called Dead City (City on the Blue River). It is dark. I see the brushstrokes, laid down carefully almost one hundred years ago. I think I begin to understand what it is to achieve immortality.

The hours pass, and I am told by our professor that it is time to leave. I walk out of the building with his burning eyes held safe in my chest.

#

It is my twenty-first birthday, and I am in Australia. We were scheduled to scuba-dive on the Great Barrier Reef today, but there has been bad weather which drove the jellyfish closer to the shore, so we are not going diving. Instead we are sitting in a man’s house watching a home movie about giant clams.

The entire film is comprised of poorly edited photos and shaky handheld footage all under a strained monotone voice-over by our host. We fidget as politely as possible, trying to understand how it has come to this. We are squished on couches and kitchen chairs in between potted plants and family pictures. I am sitting on the stairs.

It is the last day of our trip. We will be going home tomorrow. We would like to be scuba diving. Or talking with each other. Even just packing. Anything but this.

“The giant clam can reach up to 1.3 meters in shell-length,” our host drones on in the film.

I stare up at the ceiling, searching between the rafters for somewhere else to be. I find a crack and follow it down the wall until it ends behind my classmate’s head. I am suddenly investigating his face.

I have seen this face many, many times. At six in the morning pressing through the jungle, at three in the afternoon dunked in the Pacific Ocean, at breakfasts and dinners and lunches, classrooms and street corners. I have seen this face many times wrinkled with laughter, and once I saw it crying. But now I see it as the face of a stranger.

I study the planes, the pattern of freckles, and the curl of an ear. I wonder what is occurring beneath it, where the mind has gone to and whether I would ever be able to follow. My classmate turns his face, and instinctively I turn away and find myself staring into a mirror.

I tend to avoid mirrors. I don’t wear make-up. I barely need to comb my hair ever since I cut it short my freshman year of college. Especially on this trip living mostly in field stations there has been a distinct lack of mirrors. But now I am trapped staring at my own face.

Eyes too close together, nose slightly too big, pimples like volcanoes—I stop.

I squint my eyes. I erase my flesh, disintegrate the skin and muscles until I reach bone. I go deeper, the cheekbones vanish, the skull has gone, and I am nothing but the electric flash of thoughts, neurons firing faster than a heartbeat.

I see myself.

I am the sound of tires against pavement, the slap of Converse against the cobblestones of Dublin. I am the night on the train in Vienna and the slow whine of an airplane taking off. I am everywhere and everything and singular and unique.

I am all the random, awkward, disparate, infinite instances of my life. I am a crumbling castle on the edge of a cliff and the piercing eyes of Egon Schiele. I am a calm clam, silent under the pounding water.

And I do not know if it means anything. I do not know if I am changed. Am I forever ten years old, pressed against the window of our mini-van?

A classmate snorts, lulled to sleep by the man talking about giant clams. I am back in myself.