Pandemic Stories: Lost

TW: Privileged travel post, I know. And I am sorry. But please let me have a little travel nostalgia, as a treat – I’m so tired of worrying about keeping myself alive.

A curious effect of the pandemic is always knowing where you’ll be – which is where you happened to be when the borders closed down and the world contracted.

This is disconcerting for someone who is prone to losing their way, and has learned to lean into the misadventure.

I am the hapless person who once wandered Tbilisi barefoot in the failing light of dusk, because I had tripped on a bridge and snapped the straps on a sandal, the same one who wandered confusedly at midnight among the eyries of Hong Kong after being let off the tram. In Amsterdam, it was a very agreeable fall evening of haphazard meandering along the Herengracht (with a very agreeable, and similarly challenged Dutch friend) and in Paris, it was a sunny afternoon when I accosted a surprised old gentleman and his dog with a peculiar jumble of French and Italian to point me the way to the Bir-Hakeim metro station.

In Osaka I went in circles attempting to decipher cryptic directions from my Airbnb hosts until a sympathetic cafe owner finally drew me a map. In Lyon, the host’s friend deployed her husband to retrieve me from an alley just off Place des Terreaux. He didn’t speak any English and barely any French, but I understood why this unknown Portuguese was suddenly looming excitably over me.

Then there was the time in Abu Dhabi when I went off on a Jet Ski tour of the corniche at sunset and when we returned to the yacht, it had VANISHED. I will never forget the single moment of pure crystal-sharp panic at realizing I was effectively drifting in the Persian Gulf with someone I’d only met maybe an hour earlier, with no phone, no wallet and no ID. (At least he was hot?)

Being lost while traveling is a kind of controlled uncertainty. It is that exhilarating, amorphous in-between-worlds sensation, that feeling of teetering on the precipice of a multitude of opportunities – any one of which could turn out to either be a delightful unplanned adventure or a catastrophe.

In this pandemic, there is nothing uncertain about shut borders if you have no plans to leave, and there are no opportunities to set yourself adrift between one world and another, only a suspended quotidian bubble of home and work. You’re always here, precise location pinned; never not-there, never several time zones away, never a moving dot for very long.

Where you do get lost though, is in your head.

And it isn’t an aesthetic montage of studiously curated holiday photographs. It’s the awareness of your fractured mental health. It’s the ambient anxiety of losing your grip on things, or trying to breathe in the air without being suspicious of it. It’s the creeping worry of wondering when you will ever get to be vaccinated so you can fly home for a visit, or even if you will get the right vaccine that other countries have approved so you can travel again because vaccine inequality is real. It’s the ever-present stress of survival (surprise! I did not anticipate having to deal with such basic worries). It’s the void of modern loneliness, with your favourite people reduced to pixels on a screen.

It is not a terribly exciting place to get lost in, your head and all your frightful thoughts.