Motion Sickness by Tillman Lynne

Author:Tillman, Lynne [Tillman, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Literary Fiction, FICTION / Literary, Fiction
Publisher: Cursor
Published: 2013-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

Home Sick

TANGIER

A long time ago a young woman from France or Germany or Great Britain arrived here on the start of a journey. She left home to travel when travel was hard and when few women traveled alone. Or at all. I can see her. In a long brown skirt of durable material, a dark jacket, sensible shoes, a broad-brimmed hat and a scarf, she is tall and solid, short and slight, blond, dark. She does not fall in love with anything but adventure. Adventure is to her what Jesus is to nuns—the true marriage partner—and she dedicates her life, her being, to this fascinating mate. Remarkably resilient, carrying a map and compass, and only one leather suitcase, she enters Tangier on the beginning of a journey that will be her life and over many many years she loses touch with everyone she ever knew. Or her father dies, her brother marries, her mother dies, her friends marry, her lover gives up hope of her coming back and marries her cousin, and one girlfriend, who teaches school, lives out her life as a spinster, a woman with a secret, and only she keeps in touch with her. Or, no one reaches her, she breaks off relations completely, and were she to hear that her father died, it would not touch her. She ends in the desert, knowing the ways of the Bedouin, or she ends near the jungle, or she uses her inheritance to buy a large house where she lives simply and learns to fly a plane and becomes a mail carrier. Or she is desperately poor, having given her money away, and exists as an oddity in the village or town that tolerates her eccentricity. Or she trains chimpanzees to follow her as she walks around the grounds of her estate. She is Freya Stark, the writer and traveler, who urges you to “let yourself go on the stream of the unknown.” Or she is Isabelle Eberhardt who dresses like a man, and is hungry for love, for adventure, always hungry. Or she is a character like Kit Moresby in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky who goes mad and wanders in the desert forever, forever untethered.

She is eager to begin her trip. The future was the desert, as the future now is outer space, a future that science-fiction writers long ago colonized and have been waiting impatiently for us to enter. Perhaps going into the desert would be going backward since time might be curved, and anything can be the present, past or future. If this is true then my not going into the desert—to lose myself, my mind—is not just a matter of cowardice or lack of adventurousness. I may have already been there or will be going there. Still, I think about it often. Losing myself in the desert. Abandoning everything, being abandoned. Taking up residence in a small town in Iowa where no one would know me. I’d cut off all ties to my past, I’d use the frontier, I’d become a frontier.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.