Chapter 2.1 - Life Traveling

Claire’s path had been a winding one, a life choice that had brought her both interesting and unexpected experiences and endless frustration from those loved ones who would have preferred it to have some direction and purpose instead. True to the wisdom that not all those who wander are lost she had rambled through life rather than live it, gathering experiences and memories on her path like one picks up souvenirs along one’s journeys. She was old enough by now to open that symbolic box of mixed experiences and try to put them together in a broader context, in order to get the big picture.  

It wasn’t easy, the life of a traveler, even in a symbolic sense. Much like the real one, the experiential traveler hunts special moments to capture in pictures, and in the end those pictures become the reality of his or her journey, obscuring the mishaps, the strains and the inescapable human needs. The traveler might remember his disappointments and sorrows but the pictures stand alone to form a different image of one’s life, the image one chose to depict. 

The tapestry she came up with as a result was beautiful and strange, and if she wanted to be honest with herself it didn’t make much sense. That’s probably why she had decided to take a sabbatical from normal life, find the missing pieces of the puzzle and put some meaning into this random cluster of events. That is how she ended up coming back to the home of her childhood, the place where things never changed: she needed a fixed point to focus on while this chaotic soup of actions, encounters and events kept swirling around her, so involved in itself it left no room for breathing. Its relentless churning gave her motion sickness and seemed ruled more by the laws of fluid dynamics than by those of human nature - it had eddies and currents and immovable rocks, mucky dead spots and rushing white waters, and places so clear one could count all the pebbles on the rocky bottom and all the creatures who lived there.

Heeding her grandmother’s advice she went out into the garden to enjoy nature and stopped almost without thinking to sit under her oak tree. She unfolded memories inside her mind like one spreads photographs on a table, grouping them together, singling them out, looking for patterns and organizing structures in their jumbled mess. 

There were too many those special moments she had greedily accumulated, and they had too many connections between them, made without rhyme or reason. Like the brain of a three year old gobbles up reality with no discernment and creates extraneous neural pathways it has to sort out and discard later, so did Claire’s insight get weighed down by an unseemly amount of irrelevant details. 

Hidden in that foggy maze were her pivotal moments, the events that had charted her life’s path. She was surprised to notice that many of them were eminently forgettable, like for instance the day when it started raining and she sought shelter in the cafe where she ended up working for two years; that’s where she made the friend who introduced her to the local art community and a way of life which had unfolded right under her nose for years and yet she knew nothing about. She’d spent some time in their world and dedicated herself to her painting, for which she ended up deciding she had no talent, but which gave her a reason to remain immersed in this different atmosphere she tried so hard to understand. Eventually she realized there was nothing to understand, not with one’s mind, anyway. It was more like singing the song of one’s soul loud enough for the world to hear. Her inexplicable devotion to the artistic milieu threw her into the unlikely job of art curator, which required writing reviews and got her tangled in the publishing world, from which she got side tracked into travel writing and culinary reviews.  

As she looked back at her life she was amazed at the amount of living she had managed to stuff in such a short period of time and even though she was slightly disappointed that her loved ones couldn’t see her footprints on the world, criss-crossing its shifting sands like openwork embroidery, she didn’t resent them for it. How could they experience her point of view while standing in a different spot?

Despite the fact that her family deplored her lack of focus nobody accumulates this amount of life experience so young by planning for it. The complex patterns of life are so much richer than one’s ability to process them and so filled with information and details they can only be experienced in part and in context, a single layer of an infinitely thick set. It’s been mentioned so many times that our lives are unique that the meaning of the words got dulled by cliche, but it is true: no two of us see the same reality, we all have our own worlds to live in, coexisting with the others’ and impossible to peel apart. Claire had experienced her own existence in motion since she was five years old and she had seen the shadow for the first time. The shadow had called out to her ever since, trying to entice her back to the uncharted place she knew existed but kept ignoring in order to stay the course.

It is interesting how life has ways to return one to their fated path when it deems it necessary, almost surgical in the way it eliminates anything that stands in its way. There is nothing it won’t reshuffle, add or remove in order to achieve this goal. Nothing.

This lengthy session of navel gazing did yield a useful conclusion: most of her life’s defining moments were not of her doing. She shrugged the irritating thought and got up to get back into the house, since the sun had already set and the violet shadows of the night were getting thicker. As she passed through the front doors she got a glimpse of herself in the mirrors, donning a garden hat and the same unnerving smile. This time Claire didn’t cave. She stared right back at the stranger in the mirror, to get to the bottom of this crazy reflection well, but there was no bottom, just an infinite number of hers fading into the vanishing point. She gasped when she realized there were subtle differences between all of these reflections, not so pronounced that a careless glance would find them jarring, but inescapable to the attentive eye. Behind the surface of the mirror dwelt  relaxed hers, and thoughtful hers, and tense hers, and excited hers, and sad hers and absentminded hers, but there was one thing they all had in common: the garden hat. Claire wasn’t wearing a hat.

“How on earth is this even possible!” Claire thought to herself, more fascinated by the fact that the hat that didn’t belong in the reflection seemed designed to draw so much of one’s attention one wouldn’t have enough of it left to focus on the much subtler differences the Claires had between them. She looked behind her to make sure her grandmother wasn’t around to give her a piece of her mind about standing in the doorway again, and when she looked back at the mirrors she noticed the hat was gone. She got mad at herself for not taking a picture of this strange phenomenon before it was gone and promised herself that the next time the mirrors decided to go all alternate reality on her she’d snap up some evidence for posterity.

The grandfather clock struck eight and Claire headed to the dining room, where the table was already set for dinner. There were only two place settings.

“Your grandfather’s business in town took longer than anticipated. He called to let me know he’ll be staying overnight. It’s just the two of us this evening,” her grandmother smiled. Claire sat down, bewitched by the comforting aroma of baked macaroni and cheese that was filling the house. Her grandmother appeared, carrying the hot casserole from which thin wisps of steam managed to escape, even though it had the lid on. 

“Did you have a pleasant day outside?” the latter started the conversation while dishing generous heaps of gooey goodness onto the plates.

“Yes, it was very relaxing,” Claire replied, eyeing her favorite dish while her mouth watered. While she dug in, gleeful with anticipation, she realized she had no idea what her grandmother did on a regular day. “How was your day, maman?”

“Oh, you know, the usual,” her grandmother gave her a vague response. “I had a few things to attend to, there is always something that needs done in this house.”

Claire wanted to ask for more detail, but her grandmother didn’t leave her time to do so.

“Oh, speaking of things that need done, I found a hat for you to wear when you go outside. I know you spent too much time up north to remember, but in our neck of the woods it’s too hot to stay outside all day without a hat, you’re going to get yourself sunstroke. And don’t you tell me you’re going to keep in the shade. You’ve been using that excuse since you were this tall,” she held her hand slightly above the table top, “and it didn’t fly with me then either. You can get yourself a different one if you don’t like it, but in the meantime…”

Claire didn’t comment, nor did she wonder what the hat looked like. She had a vague idea.