Heart of a Wanderess, Sheltering In

Stephanie Nikolopoulos

A blur of green arced across the dimming sky. My eyes fluttered up from the pages of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, surprised by this shock of wild beauty. Captivated, I pad over to the edge of the hostel balcony to watch the little parrot join his flock sheltering under the lush leaves of a tree. The birds were settling in for the night in the shadows of the mountains of Colombia.

I settled back in my multi-striped hammock, well-worn from other vagabond travelers, my wanderlust soul finally feeling at rest.

When the cornflower dusk deepened til I could no longer read the print on the paperback pages, I read the landscape bewitched in the golden glow of soft lamplight. The waterfall-like spray of leaves on a bush. A tree branch heavy with mangoes. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta now blurring into the night sky. A landscape so inextricably different from the skyscrapers and ever-present lights back home in New York City.

The friend I’d come to visit, who’d been living at the hostel, teaching English and working on her novel, handed me a cold bottle of Aguila that we’d gotten at the small market in town earlier that day. We talked into the night, our hammocks swaying side-to-side. It was the raw, unedited talk that only happens after you’ve exhausted shallow niceties.

I breathed in the humid South American air. I breathed out the editing assignments piling up, the stress of burning the candle at both ends, the nagging feel that I should be further ahead than I already am. I breathed in peace. I breathed in hope that this trip, ostensibly to visit a friend who’d left everything behind, would somehow also give me the confidence to not merely meet expectations but to actively choose the life I wanted.

I’d escaped my routine. The mounting pressure of trying to attain perfection. Perfect job record. Dutiful daughter. Dedicated sister. Go-to friend for those in need of a shoulder. Girlfriend who maintained seemingly effortless positivity. I had left it all behind when I boarded a plane with a notebook, a novel, and a few spare changes of clothing.

This was my time. My time to explore. My time to read. My time to write. My time to rest, enjoying my own company and indulging in my own passions. Following my bliss at home felt selfish, but on vacation I could be the person I felt like I was truly meant to be. Writer. Dreamer. Traveler.

I had always thought this wanderlust grew out of a desire to experience the world in all its kaleidoscopic marvels. I’d been chasing beauty for years. The sun piercing the pre-dawn morning over the Grand Canyon. The sun setting golden over Ponte Vecchio as I read a pocket-sized Bible in Florence. Multicolored leaves twirling over my head as I lay on a bench listening to ’90s rock on my headphones somewhere in Montana. The bamboo rising higher in the Japanese sky than my eyes could see.

Now, as I shelter in place in my New York apartment amidst a worldwide pandemic, at times frenzied with projects but mandated to be socially distant, I am compelled to be still. Reflecting on my urge to travel, to wander, to explore, I think back to those quiet moments of exotic joy, and I realize the exoticism wasn’t in a place. It was in the permission to make time for myself. To make time for exploring my creative impulses. To make time for exploring art and beauty.

Instead of a hammock, I am reading in my bed. My eyes are fluttering up to the green leaves that are now growing on previously bare tree branches. I am hearing the sounds around me: yes, the ambulances, but also the first clap echoing from a balcony across the street from me as we begin our nightly cheer for essential workers, water running through a pipe in my wall, the mechanical chime of an ice cream truck that signals the passing of time from the dark days of winter to the hope of a new season.