Dubai, Honolulu, Marrakesh…
Perhaps not everyone window-shops for adventure, but I was raised by travelers and had a genetic predisposition for it. In our house we had almost as many maps as books, and the books reached as high as the ceiling.
Traveling had always been a part of my life. My parents were independent filmmakers and their whole marriage was one long honeymoon trip, occasionally docking in Sydney to regroup and refuel. My two younger brothers and I came along for the ride.
I had a passport before I could walk, and when I was little, one of my favorite games was to spin the globe in my father’s office and jab my finger at a destination, then try to read the name. I just loved the idea of far-off places, and when I spun the globe, it was all one big swirl of possibilities.
Standing on the busy city street watching tired-eyed women in black suits rush past on their way home, I couldn’t help feeling a little in awe of that child who had played with a globe of the world like it was a toy. Life was still a game to her, because she hadn’t been burdened with the questions that plagued this shopgirl’s waking hours:
“Is this blue or black?”
“What size is a fourteen?”
“How do you get to Menswear?”
Surely I was destined for something more than this? I’m relatively intelligent. I mean, I’m no Einstein, but on an intelligence graph I rank somewhere between Posh Spice and Stephen Hawking. Okay, more up the Posh Spice end, because graphs make me dizzy. But surely the extent of my ability wasn’t holding T-shirts up to the light to determine whether they were dark navy or bluish-black?
The job was only ever meant to be temporary. I’d been hired to work through the busy Christmas season, but that was more than two years ago. I was asked to stay on because I was good at the work, and I accepted, always thinking it would only be a couple more months until something else took off in my life and I could leave the smell of plastic suit bags and the click of hangers behind.
What that something else was I didn’t know. I wasn’t content to just do something for the sake of doing something, though if I’d agreed to fulfill my role in the social contract then I would already have been most of the way through a law degree.
We all have a social contract, whether we’re aware of it or not. It lays out the terms and conditions of our lives, how we are to behave and what is expected of us at each juncture. No courts or judges are needed to see that it’s upheld; guilt and obligation work perfectly well. Simple comments like “after all your parents went through to get you a decent education” are usually enough to keep most of us in check.
My parents had been patient. They had agreed that I should take a year off after high school to think about what I wanted to do. But as a year stretched to two my father’s face became increasingly pained whenever he asked the question, “Have you thought about what you want to do with your life?”
What I want to do with my life?
What I want to do with my life?
I want to be wild and daring and dance till dawn beneath a full moon. I want to hitch my caravan to a star and live each day like it’s my last… But as far as I knew that wasn’t a job description, so what could I say?
Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic. Maybe I’m just plain hopeless. But I wanted to live a passionate life. I wanted to feel a part of the world and be in love with the world. I wanted to live my destiny, and whatever that was, I knew it wasn’t nine to five, or a house in the suburbs, or a Birkin bag. And I wasn’t going to compromise. I didn’t want a plan B. I didn’t want anything to fall back on, because I was afraid that if I chased up a plan B, I might miss my plan A.
I’m sure I’m not the only high school graduate to have an existential crisis, but all my friends seemed to have made a smooth transition from school to university life. We met up every now and again for happy hour cocktails, and they would talk about jurisprudence and negatively geared mortgages, and I’d go home afterward knowing that however crazy I might seem, I’d made the right choice, because there must be more to life than case studies and water views.
It seemed that everywhere I looked all I could see was emptiness. There was emptiness in the excitement with which a woman bought a thousand-dollar outfit for a wedding. She’d wear it once, maybe twice, and then it would be forgotten in the back of the wardrobe. There was emptiness in the men who came in looking for a gift for their wives. They’d tell us what size and how much they wanted to spend and we would choose something and wrap it up, and the man would tuck the receipt safely away so she could come back and exchange it for what she really wanted. It seemed as though everyone was rushing and running and saving and spending and always trying to get that one last thing that would make their lives complete, whether it was Sascha’s gloves in the window of Hermès or the big job a customer needed a new suit for. But I never saw anyone who was actually truly happy with what they had.
So while the other shopgirls fogged up the windows of Cartier and Tiffany, I stood gazing longingly at airfares. And for some reason I couldn’t get those images of the gypsy camp out of my mind.
Why don’t you…run away with the gypsies?
Why not?