“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
― Cesare Pavese
When I was 19, I fell in deep, true love. The butterflies, fireworks, Disney-bullsh*t kind of love. The kind of love where you become obsessed, enthralled, besotted. And that year, I was lucky enough to fall in love not once, but twice.
It all started when I applied to join a study abroad program. I was visiting home over Christmas break, when my mom had handed over a big stack of mail that had been sent to me at her address. Bill, bill, banking statement, and one glossy brochure. In that brochure were pages of travel photos, depicting what a summer abroad could be like. Having never left the country, I was enticed by the idea of a spending a summer abroad. I decided to sign up on a whim, choosing Turkey as my country of preference because the pictures were the most beautiful.
5 months later, I woke up in another country, with no knowledge of the language, people or culture. I was exhausted from 16 hours comprised of three different flights, so thirsty but unable to drink the tap water (we were told it would make us sick), and totally overwhelmed. I peeked out through the curtains of my hotel window and saw the bluest skies I've ever witnessed, and the deep maroon pink of bougainvillea crawling across white, plaster walls. I was dazzled.
Thus, I fell head-over-heels the first time. Only a few short days later, I knew I was (improbably) falling in love again.
His laugh was captivating to me. He had the craziest life, full of wild stories I almost believed were made-up. He was smart and full of insight. His laugh was booming, his smile wide. One night we stayed up on the pool deck of our hotel, talking about our dreams and staring out over a million Turkish stars. I sang him a song that was stuck in my head - Green Eyes, by Coldplay (the song we would do our first dance to at our wedding).
Aaron and I have always had many things in common, many things we want to aspire to. When our paths crossed during that summer abroad, we began to aspire towards a life together. We’ve both accomplished lots of the things we’ve wanted - getting our Bachelor’s degrees, our teaching credentials, having a beautiful wedding, and traveling as much as possible in between. Our four years together has been amazing. But I still long for my first love (and I know he does, too): more travel.
As long as we’ve been together, we’ve talked about moving abroad and experiencing a more rich and permanent type of travel: one that would allow us to learn languages, see the entirety of another country, and really get to be immersed in a different culture. Finally, four years after falling in love in another country, we’re getting the chance to move abroad. For the next 2+ years, we will be serving as Peace Corps volunteers in Morocco.
Though it might seem so, deciding to move to Morocco (where we will be doing our Peace Corps service) hasn’t been an easy decision for us. There are tons of things I feel like I’m giving up on or postponing, in order to make this dream a reality. I will be finishing my teaching credential in July, and I’m sad that while the rest of my friends job hunt, I have to wait another 2 years to have a classroom of my own. I love the elementary school that I student-teach at, and would be thrilled to apply for one of the openings they have for next year, but that’s something I’m giving up doing. Aaron is leaving the school where he’s taught for 3 years, and some of his best friends and students that mean the world to him. On top of putting a hold on our careers, we’re also putting what feels like a hold on life. Getting married at 22 gives me ample time to do everything, but there are plenty of days when I wish we were adopting fur babies, or saving to buy a house or work to become foster parents (another dream of ours). But all these things can wait. They’ll still be here for us when we return.
And hopefully, because we will have spent these two years abroad, learning and being pushed constantly out of our comfort zones, we will come back and be better teachers, friends and people than we were before.
That’s the magic of travel: it forces you to grow in ways you didn’t know you could
(and sometimes, you're lucky enough to fall in love in the process).
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