Stories from My Travels #2: Monica, the Modern Mariner

Here’s a story inspired by a traveller I met on the bus to Carcassonne, a small medieval fortified town in the south of France. It also draws inspiration from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, a poem which gave me Stockholm syndrome from the number of times I had to read it for my essay. For those who are not familiar with Coleridge’s poem, it is a VERY long poem about the ancient mariner, a man who has the power to capture someone’s attention with his “glittering eye”. If you are the chosen victim, you “cannot choose but hear” his tale; as for him, he is doomed to keep telling this tale to strangers when the impulse seizes him. That is his curse. And all because he shot an albatross.

 

Monica lost her phone a week ago. She had to cross the globe from India to France without any connection. It was the most tragic week of her life. The lack of intimacy, actual human intimacy was too much for her to bear.

So when the boy stepped onto the bus, she did her best to make eye contact. She didn’t turn away looking smug, like she usually did in parties or social situations where she was wearing a crop top. It wasn’t because she knew she was attractive, it was just…that was the way she was.

But this time, she had to. She was desperate. The boy didn’t seem the type who understands the “hard-to-get” etiquette; his eyes were too far-off. She even pushed the corners of her lips as best she could to produce a ghost of a smile.

They locked eyes. Now it was up to him.

The moment he recognized her, he hesitated. Earlier today he had seen her at the train station. They were both waiting at the ticket office. After a pause, he went ahead and sat in the seat in front of her. She held her breath.

The bus started. After a while, she heard a voice, “You’re going to Carcassonne too?”

Growing up in downtown Toronto, Monica was the youngest in a family of six. She read a lot of Margaret Atwood when she was young. Elaine Risley from Cat’s Eye was who she wanted to be when she grew up. Free, artistic, cool. But she had large shoes to fill, and to her parents, her feet had stopped growing when she was twelve. They were people whose careers evoked murmurs of satisfaction; one a successful entrepreneur, the other a lawyer. As if those weren’t enough excuses for Monica to rebel when she failed her final year exams, her two elder sisters went on to study medicine at the University of British Columbia while her brother took up an engineering apprenticeship in England. Indignantly, Monica told her parents she was going to study art and design in the States, and she did. Her parents didn’t say anything; nothing had to be said. In the beginning, Monica went back home every Christmas and summer. Then she went back once a year. By the end of her degree, she had hardly spoken to her parents. Most of their messages were left on read.

Her brother and sisters visited once. They took one look at her and said, “You’re becoming one of them, aren’t you?” Monica took a puff from her cigarette and blew it in their faces. But it was true. Her hair cut in a bob with a perfectly straight fringe, the blond streaked with pink, wearing an oversized fleece and baggy jeans that stopped at the ankles, complete with worn-out white sneakers grimy with dirt, Monica had become part of the “artsy-fartsy cult”, as her siblings called it. Those were the last things she heard from them, before she turned on her heels and marched back into her shabby shared flat in a back alley two blocks from the art school.

After graduating, she decided to go travelling. Was it a gap year, people asked. No, it wasn’t. What was it, then? She had no idea. But it was the perfect opportunity to get away, escape society, be wild and free, do whatever she wanted.

“I’ve been on the road for ten months now,” she was telling the boy. Over the headrest of the seat, she could only see his face from the eyes upwards. They didn’t seem very far-off now.

Ten months? That’s crazy. “I know, can’t believe it’s been almost a year”, she said, smiling inwardly with satisfaction. She was impressed with herself, but she needed someone to tell her that. “I think this is my life now. I didn’t mean it to be, but I think that’s how it’s happened.” She saw herself on National Geographic, walking around villages or in classrooms teaching poor children.

“I started out in India.” And how was it? “Oh, I absolutely love it. I hated it at first, because everything’s so…ugh, you know? The places are cramped and dirty, the people look at you like they’re gonna pick your pockets, and I just didn’t feel comfortable. But then I realized, it’s all part of the travelling experience. You get used to it, and then it quickly becomes your new home. It just grows on you. I even got to know some really nice people. It’s great, living there for five months; no one know you, no one judges you, it’s like starting over again. It’s great. And the food, oh the food…”

Living in India was the harshest five months of her life. Living in constant fear of being robbed or kidnapped, Monica developed paranoia and spent sleepless nights with her wallet in her pockets and her pouch hidden underneath her shirt. No one spoke her language, and she felt increasingly lonely. The only nice people she met were the ones who did speak English, and they were tourists who stayed for three days at most. She spent the rest of her time alone, confining herself to her room more and more, because what could she do? There was no one to talk to…

But it was all part of the process of learning to adapt, of opening your eyes to the world and understanding different culture. The insecurities you have to fix are within you, and by putting yourself out there, “you’re forced to confront it, and it feels so much better when you have. I miss India a lot, and I’m so looking forward to going back.”

Thinking back on it, she did seem not to have enjoyed herself as much as she could’ve. Maybe she would give it a second shot.

The bus rumbled on. Outside, fields of daffodils rolled by, temporarily segregating the green of the pastures with a vast square of yellow. They were sitting in a finely furbished, air-conditioned bus, a replacement of the cancelled train from Toulouse Matabiau to Carcassonne.

With the boy’s eyes fixed on her, Monica rested her head against the window and sighed contentedly. “This bus is so much better than the one I had to ride in to Delhi.” She waited for him to ask the next question, which he did.

“Oh, I was stuck on a bus for forty hours.” The look on his face was exactly what she had expected. She smiled pitifully. “But what’s worse is that I had to listen to Nepali music blasting all day and all night. In a bus packed with people!”

It was horrible. Maybe the journey wasn’t as long as she said, but adding sixteen hours to the actual duration wouldn’t really make much of a difference to the magnitude of suffering she endured anyway. Plus, she felt much better after saying it, as if the more she told of how much she had suffered, the more pain was taken from the memory of it. Maybe the guilt of exaggerating outweighed the actual memory itself.

Still, it was the hardest thing she had done in her life, and she had to tell somebody, even if it meant damaging her integrity a bit.

“So then I got to the Delhi airport, but right before my flight something really bad happened. I was in the toilet when my hands slipped and I dropped my phone. I was late for my flight so I didn’t really have time to checked the damage, but when I got on the plane, I took it out and looked and it was bad. Like, really bad. Screen was smashed, and all there was were lines of colour. Couldn’t switch it on at all.

“I arrived in London, but because my phone was broken I couldn’t contact my friend. I was so lost.”

So what did you do?

“Well, I slept at the airport”, she said, giving an embarrassed smile. The reaction she got was priceless. She kept going. “Oh, it’s not all that bad you know. I just hop off the plane and go straight to bed.” They shared a brief laugh. “You use to look at all the people lying about in the airport, and you’re like, they must’ve had it bad. And when you become one of them, you’re like, hey, that’s not so bad!

“You do have to worry about your bags though. And finding places where you actually get a bit of space to yourself. Instead of having to rest your head on someone else’s bag, or having someone’s feet in your face the whole night. We all need a bit of privacy.”

Sleeping in the airport wasn’t all that bad. She did end up finding a couch where she had her own space, and yet she still passed each night with her eyes wide open, staring at the bottom of the escalator sheltering her.

During those long nights, she considered what she had become.

The airport is a place where people come and go, where planes arrive and depart, where families wait expectantly and people leave with additional company. Yet there she was, stationed under the escalator, listening to the rolling of suitcases and catching the whiff of morning coffee before the sun rose. She was stuck while everyone was moving on.

The boy was saying how travelling for a week has made him realize how much he missed his family. She nodded and murmured in agreement, not really listening.

Monica wondered if her parents and siblings have moved on too. They must have. She had come to realize that they wouldn’t always be there to hear her complaints when she needed it, because she had never been there while they were talking to her, and now that she really wasn’t there, there would be no point to talk to her at all. Looking at her cracked phone, she realized she knew nothing about her parents now. They were utter strangers.

Her parents must’ve thought she was dead. She laughed, “Yeah, maybe. I miss them a lot. It’s been quite a while now.” Did she miss them? She wasn’t sure. Yet there was no one to talk to…

“You know they even have this website called sleepinginairports.net. It’s quite cool. It rates Toulouse airport 4.7 out of 5 stars. Really lives up to its name, though, the airport. Someone brought me freshly made pancakes at like half past four in the morning. How amazing is that!”

The boy asked her where she was going to next.

“I was gonna go straight from London to Carcassonne, to live with a lady whose farm I’ll work on, but those bloody train strikes delayed me for three days, so I had to seek refuge in Toulouse Airport for a while. I haven’t really done much, just been going from internet café to internet café. I was so stressed out about the phone! Even now, I’m not sure how to get to my host family. I can’t call them. I’ve spent days trying to find a phone, but everywhere I go I just feel like they’re trying to rip you off, you know, so I just left. It’s really stressing me out, not being able to contact them. And no one is able to speak a proper English sentence! I don’t know what to do.”

He said she could borrow his phone. He couldn’t believe she wasn’t able to get hold of a phone for three days. “I know, it’s so stressful, but thank you so much, you don’t know how much you’ve helped me. Honestly.”

While Monica was calling her host family, she remembered one night at the airport, when she’d gotten herself a bottle of cheap Bordeaux red wine, deciding that she was going to relieve herself from this stress. After half a bottle, she was overcome by this impulse to call someone. She wanted to call her ex-boyfriend. She wanted to talk to her friends. She wanted to complain to her parents. She looked at her broken phone and cried.

She hung up and proclaimed that it was all fine. Her hostess had replied and was on her way to pick her up. “Thank you so much.”

They passed a tunnel which temporarily swallowed everything in darkness. Then they were through and the relentless sunlight blinded them for a moment. Through her squint the boy could see the sparkle in Monica’s eyes. It was dazzling.

After a while, she said, “You know, after such a long time of travelling alone, it’s not really a holiday anymore. I used to think getting away from home would be such a good thing. I could really become who I wanted to be, do what I wanted to do. No one would be there to tell me what I was doing wasn’t the way forward, that it wouldn’t come to anything.

“In big cities I’d look at all these people in suits, ties, heels, handbags, briefcases, and I’d think, I’m so different from you all. I’m glad my life isn’t a massive boring routine like yours. I can be here, I can be there whenever I want, whenever I feel like it. You? You quit your job and your whole life collapses, and not just your own. Your wives or husbands’ too, and maybe your kids. You need society like an addict needs his drugs.

“But then, at the airport, looking at them hurrying home for dinner or kissing goodbye after dessert, I thought, at least they have something, someone to look forward to. Me? At moments like those I felt lost and aimless. The bigger my world appears to be, the more I don’t know what to do with myself. Sure, I love travelling by myself, but somedays you just wake up and think, what am I doing? What do I want? Now that I get to do things my way, what is it that I want to do? That’s when I want someone to be travelling with me. They motivate you to do things, to keep your life going.”

Monica looked at him. The boy’s eyes were completely fixated on her, mesmerised as if she were Medusa herself. “I look at all the bohemians and beggars on the streets, and I realize maybe I’m one of them. Maybe by excluding myself from this society I’m just putting myself in another. Humans can’t exist alone. We’re dependent on one another, whether we like it or not. I have to share with you my story, otherwise all I’ve gone through would’ve been for nothing.”

She sighed and looked out of the window. “Maybe I’m not as different as I thought I was. I romanticize things too much, and in the end, reality just doesn’t live up to your expectations. I don’t know what to do now. Go home, and be good for nothing? Or go around the world, with no particular direction? The world is so big, and yet there’s no one to talk to…”

Suddenly she heaved a massive yawn. “I’m so tired. All this talking is exhausting.” She lay down across the seats and closed her eyes. A few minutes later she was fast asleep against the bumpiness of the road, her head bouncing softly against her rucksack.

She was unaware that, completely entranced by the gaze of her turquoise eyes, the boy had barely listened to a word she was saying. For the rest of the journey he sat there, pondering.