The Fit Theory

During the turbulent and exciting time of my travels, on the road to self-discovery and Visa debt, I have seen people from all corners of the world making new continents and cultures their new home. Every once in a while, I paused when the pace of my adventures allowed for peace and reflection and asked “Why are some seemingly content either never leaving their nest, or always coming back to it? And why others are restless until they land on an unknown soil?”

I got “stuck” in Rio as soon as soon I got there. It was an affair, a “lust” at first sight. I’m not using “love” because after months of living there, I discovered that it cannot (yet?) offer me everything I need, and for now it will be my passionate lover, but not my true love. However, I felt a fit that I rarely experienced before. Temporary or not, it was a comforting feeling to be accepted by a city. To accept a city. To be excited, stimulated, intrigued and inspired by it.

This is my theory of what happens in the first scenario of always coming home, like a boomerang. Let’s say Matilda goes on trips, for a few weeks or a month, and when she comes back to Vancouver, she breathes in the clear crisp air, opens her large umbrella, and trots to her hot yoga class where she has a pre-paid membership for the next year. Everything is clean and orderly. Vancouver is easy and neat, like a landscape painting hanging on a wall of a Best Western. She enjoyed the boisterous markets of Morocco, and she loved the sleepy villages of South France. But here in her city, she has the comforts of TV with travel programs, her weekly dinners with the girls, and her steady job that allows for those mini getaways. Matilda and Vancouver are a pretty good match.

Now, we have Chester. Chester always found Asian comics and cartoons absolutely fascinating. He had crushes on ESL students in his high school, and all his university electives were in Japanese. He lived placidly in his West End apartment, filling his time with work, social activities and hobbies. He could never walk by a travel agency advertising trips to the Asian Pacific without stopping and gawking for a while. His best friend won two tickets to Osaka, and took Chester with him since his girlfriend unwisely dumped him a week before. Chester practiced his Japanese, walked around enamoured by everything he saw, and bounded with the locals. Coming back to Vancouver, he was devising a scheme to relocate permanently. Chester and Vancouver are just not meant to be.

Like relationships, nowadays we choose our city mates. Most of us are lucky enough to have options. Had I lived in a village not knowing what exists out there, perhaps I could have had a content life in the pond where I was born. But knowing of the sea out there, and finding the pond I'm in just a little too restricting, it is forgivable to embark on a quest.