What do you call a traveler who can’t say goodbye?

It’s going to be two weeks, exactly at 12am, since I arrived in Uppsala. I can’t believe it is two weeks already. Feels like I have been here forever, at least a few months. Life is strange.. last days in Toronto seems a distant reality, not something happened two weeks ago. It is funny how easily our mind gets used to new environments, places and people, at times when you least expect it to happen. I have always been fascinated by travel writings, well needless to say that most of them were by men (though I found a wonderful anthology of women travelers), but they always promote the same image of a lonely traveler passing by, without any regrets, or memories of the past haunting along the journey. They don’t feel sad about the places they had just left, they are always excited about the places they will visit next.. and they only carry memories, beautiful, pleasant, sometimes adventurous but not so dangerous or painful memories. I wanted to be that traveler. I imagined myself as one of them. Never, ever would I have suspected that my travel journal would start with tears, and continue with sadness, pain and melancholy.

Oh, melancholy.. what a beautiful word that is.. I first came across the word ‘melancholy’, maybe that was not my first encounter with the word, but when that word particularly struck me, was when reading Ivan Turgenev’s translated short story ‘Asya’. The author describes of a calm quiet evening, (this I recall from my memory since I don’t have the book with me to recheck), when the protagonist was sitting under a lemon tree by the river, hearing music and merry voices of partying people in the distance, feeling the soft breeze on his cheek, when for no reason he becomes suddenly overshadowed with the feeling of melancholy. Well, as a reader you read, but grasping the feeling, the true meaning (if there’s such), not necessarily. But there I was, on a plane named ‘Hengil’, looking at the distant lights beneath, and the clouds that obscure the landscape, overcoming with the feeling of melancholy!

Maybe I should start narrating the story from the beginning.. It’s not a very beautiful story but not a very ugly one either. Maybe there is no point in narrating this story, maybe that’s why I didn’t want to write it for two weeks, maybe no one will be interested in reading it. But I can assure that it’s going to be different, different than the popular travel journals/writings of a happy-go-traveler, because this traveler did not want to travel. Well, that was not the entire case, she wanted to, as much as she did not want to. You know, human mind is quite a complex thing. You can never try to draw boundaries or try to fit that into certain clearly labelled boxes. So when I say, this traveler wanted to travel as much as she did not want to, you should understand that this is not the only case, there is a subsequent pattern.. well you will understand it quite clearly when you come to the part where ‘she wants to be alone, as much as she does not want to be alone!’ So let’s skip it for now.

People say that you learn so much about yourself, apart from the things outside yourself, through journeys. If I have learned anything, anything at all, from previous journeys is that I’m no traveler, at least not in a sense how the word ‘traveler’ denotes certain kinds of personalities or attitudes. Me? No.. Never.., though I badly wanted to be one, though I badly wanted to feel the earth sliding beneath my feet. I still remember the day when I left SriLanka, I kept reminding myself that I am off to an adventure and will be back in no time. But somewhere, somewhere deep in my heart I knew that I won’t be back, at least not for a while. I remember the wrinkles on amma’s face, (they were ‘sad’ wrinkles not ‘old’ wrinkles cuz amma never gets old! She still boasts about not having a single grey hair) I know she was sad though she pretended to hide it, because she knew I’ll be gone forever. Appa never suspects anything.. I remember the grey hair on the sides, his smile, the proud and also painful look in his eyes.. I was his favourite girl!! Akka and thambi used to push me to get anything from dad, let it be some pocket money, going to a movie, dinner at a restaurant, or shopping for some treats at Cargills supermarket. He never said no to me. And I didn’t tell him that I won’t be back. I didn’t tell him that his little girl is now grown up and going away. I didn’t cry then, at the airport, but I do now, when thinking back every now and then. I so wish I had said good-bye! I so wish I had said sorry! I so wish…

So you might have an idea right now.. It’s a story of a girl who regrets leaving people and memories behind, who feels sorry that she did/didn’t do certain things.. though off to an adventure, the strong presence of melancholy shadows her along the way. As a little girl picking up seashells along the shore, she collects memories of the past, good or bad, happy or sad, carefully wrapping them in her little flowing skirt.

Now, what do you call a traveler who can’t say goodbye, who can’t leave the past behind?

What do you call her?