I got 1200 pictures, but the world ain’t one.
I used to have a book a boyfriend had given me the week I was trying to break up with him. We only ever fought about one thing – my dreams of travel. All I ever craved was the excitement of a foreign land, starting life over from scratch, finding my true character as it’s put to the test; and he thought all that was stupid. All he wanted in life was a wife, his Xbox, his cat, and his Xbox. And I thought all that was stupid (except his cat. I still miss that cat). As we fought our big fight and he called me nasty names and told me I was immature for not wanting to settle down, everything I had put off for that relationship gently made its way into my consciousness. I wasn’t mad at him – or myself, for that matter – I was just ready to stop pretending and start fulfilling.
He realized it, too.
In an effort to not lose me all together, he switched sides. Suddenly, he wanted to go places with me. He started googling information on visas and apartments and travel insurance to anywhere I may want to go (except France. He hated the French). He bought me travel books and photo albums – which leads me back to that book.
A photographic journey through every country in the world – or at least the front and back covers boasted as much. As for the inside – I had never opened it. Four months after our break-up, it was still in its cellophane wrapping. I wanted to open it. I wanted to see these pictures of places I had never been.
Maybe he had hoped to sit down with me and watch as I turned through the pages and pointed at pictures and said, “There! No…there!!!” He would have made a mental list, gone online for the research, impressed me with his gusto and told me we would go. But he would have never followed through. It was a trick – that book was a hopeful trick. And that’s why I couldn’t open it.
I wanted the world and he couldn’t give it to me – so he bought me a book.
The back of the book said that from the 1200 images within, one could form “one complete picture” of the entire world. Did he think I would find him amidst all the pages of pictures? Truth be told, I would have seen 1200 reasons I could never stay with him.
I don’t know why I was afraid to open it – like peeling back the cellophane would unleash a smoke of death like whatever it was they opened up in Indiana Jones that killed everyone who saw it. Maybe it was that only the cover that attracted him to buy it. It’s unlikely he leafed through millions and millions of books to find the best suited one for me. He knew he was losing me and it was his last-minute effort to immediately band-aid the situation.
Yet at the same time, it was hard for me to completely let go of the book. Or maybe it was hard for me to find the courage to full-on step into the flow of the life I had always really dreamed of having.
Either way, I finally took the book back to Barnes and Noble, still in package, and exchanged it for a few magazines about scuba diving and exotic islands and beaches and a book on how to flirt in French. Smiling at how good I felt, I stumbled across an open copy of the book I had held on to for so long. I leafed through the pages and had the overwhelming sense that I had made the perfect decision. I wanted to see the world on my terms, not someone else’s.
Nearly four years later, I am happy to report: so far, so good.
See me if you want to learn how to say things like “I bet that outfit would look even better on my bedroom floor” or “Would you like to be my plaything?” in French.