Goodbye, again.

No more tearful flights back to LA. The next time I’m returning to LA on an airplane, it’s going to be because I’m either visiting friends and/or family for a very short period of time, or because I have a connecting flight through LA. Not because I’m returning to live here. This city was not designed for people like me.

As I write this I am literally wiping away tears, which, annoyingly, are continuously falling. I really look forward to the day when I can have a “return flight” experience at an airport that doesn’t render me a useless blubbering idiot for the next 12-48 hours. It’s the curse of being a multi-national, growing up in London, possibly the most international of all the world’s cities, and compounding that with my having attended an international school for 12 years (so my friends are literally from every corner of the globe and move around continuously, like me), and finally the fact that I’ve now lived in 5 different countries. It doesn’t matter where the f in the world I go, for the rest of my life, whatever country I visit or move to, I’m going to be leaving behind people I love. And the goodbyes never seem to get any easier. It’s the plight of the traveller.

It really hit me a few weeks ago when I told one of my best friends from LA that soon I was really, NEVER going to live in the godforsaken city of Los Angeles ever again. She looked at me sadly and said, “I’m gonna miss you so much!”  I felt horrible when I realised I had a huge grin on my face because I was so damn excited to leave LA, I didn’t even think about the people I’d be leaving behind. After having travelled so much, you kind of become numb to thinking about that part after a while.

Sadly though, that is the curse of the traveller. I’m not cold or insensitive, I’m just numb to the whole goodbye process at this point. For some reason though, the tearful goodbye things does seem to find a way of creeping up on me at airports. This last trip back to London really surprised me with the waves of sadness that washed over me on my last night in the city. Then, after checking in at Heathrow, I found myself fighting back tears for the first 3 hours of my flight. It’s hard. It also made me realise that as much as I love travelling and having loved ones around the globe, I really do want to find somewhere that I can call home. I just haven’t found that place yet. It’s definitely NOT Los Angeles – a fact that is made very apparent to me every time I get on plane to come back here. I cannot stand this place. (Sorry to all my friends that live in LA – but you all know me well enough to know my thoughts on Los Angeles, and most of the USA in general.)

Not everyone has it in them to roam the globe like I do. Many people do when they’re younger, but most people get to a point where they want to settle down and have some permanence in their life. For me however, since I don’t really have a sense of home, stopping travelling is practically impossible for me. I’m still looking for that place that feels like I’m supposed to be in. The place where I’m supposed to end up. I feel and have felt very comfortable in a lot of places in my life, but nowhere has ever really felt like home for me, with the exception of London. Now however, as much as I love London, I know I would be limiting myself to stay there and stop my travels. I need to find my home.

Over the years, my not having a sense of home has made introductions to new people very complicated. In fact, I tend to get pretty defensive when people introduce me as being “from” any specific city (especially LA). When I was little and growing up in London I used to get mad at my parents when they would tell people we would meet on holiday that we were from London. I would angrily say “And we’re American too!”. Then, as I grew older and developed more of a sense of national pride for England, I would get really angry when British people would call me a “Yank” or meet me and say “You American?”. Now, I’m seriously offended (and actually a little hurt) if someone who knows me fairly well introduces me to someone as being “from LA”. Let me make this very clear, I am absolutely in no way at all from Los Angeles. My parents own a house in Los Angeles and I have lived in that house on and off sporadically between my travels. That’s it. I never spent more than a week in one stay in California before the age of 21.

When someone introduces me as being “from LA”, I immediately cut off whoever is introducing me and remind them that I’m also half British (and sometimes I also add that I lived in Uganda for the better part of a year, and France, and Mexico for almost 2 years). I think I’m different from most travellers in that, while most travellers are roaming around, they also know where their “home” is and where they will likely eventually go back to. They say “home is where the heart is”. I have no fucking clue where my heart is. I love London, but I don’t see myself living there again. I don’t know where I’m supposed to be or where I’ll end up.

Consequentially, when I meet other travellers, I immediately want to know more about them. When travellers meet other travellers, there’s an automatic connection. We have an innate ability to sift through different cities, countries and continents, unaffected and without really getting homesick. The ability to see through and really understand the world and all the things that both divide and unite people – politics, wars, borders, religion, racism, laws, fear, narrow-mindedness, guns, health care, education, drugs, violence, sexism, terrorism, poverty…the list of things that keep so much of the world divided is a long one. With that being said, the things that unite people and countries are amazing and wonderful and things that all travellers truly embrace and celebrate together – food, drinks, art, museums, clubs, sports, music festivals, the World Cup, the Olympics, national treasures, and the many, many wonders of the world. I believe that travellers have the ability to see past all of the above aforementioned drawbacks listed, and they instead see and thirst for only the positive things.

One thing that is certain, is that while I may have gotten slightly used to saying goodbye, it never really gets any easier. When I was younger I used to drag it out. My friends and I would say goodbye to each other a dozen times, torturing ourselves. Now that I’m older I prefer to just get it over with. Rip off the band aid and carry on.

Some of my goodbyes from the last few months have really reminded me of that. I truly understand that it is a small world…but it’s still not that small. When you love someone and they aren’t near you…it fucking sucks. It doesn’t matter if they’re a city away or a continent away. There’s a lot of people I miss every single day. I think it might be easier for me if I had someplace to call home, like all the people I miss do. Or if someone would figure out teleportation already.

So, on the one hand, while I am truly grateful for this traveller’s existence and life I’ve been thus far privileged to lead… I also see the flip side. Basically, wherever I go in this world now, whether I’m arriving or departing, I’m always leaving someone I love or deeply care about behind me. I don’t know where my home is (London?), I don’t know where my family lives (don’t even get me started on that one – that’s a whole new blog post), I don’t have one place where all my friends I went to school with are, and when I think about where my ashes will one day be scattered…well, I really have no clue where I’d want that to be either (definitely NOT in the USA).

So, on to the next country?