Road Weary

View of Manhattan from a friend’s apartment

It’s been nearly a month since we left Portland and we’ve laid our heads down to sleep in a different spot almost every night. I grow weary. I’m weary of the movement, weary of the chatter, and weary of the packing and unpacking of bags. We have one more day of this vagabond life before we get to settle like falling leaves in an apartment in Chattanooga, but what will be left of me by then?

Calling this a vagabond life makes it sound romantic, but right now it doesn’t feel that way. It’s not the motion and the living out of a backpack that is getting to me; it’s the constant flow of hellos and goodbyes, the what have you been up to’s, and a schedule that has us jumping between these interactions at a rapid-fire pace. It seems that there has hardly been an hour or more since we left Portland that the room I’m in hasn’t been filled with chatter, or barking dogs, or the drone of a television screen. It wears on me. It wearies me.

But I remind myself that our life is good. We are lucky to have the freedom to take so much time to visit and catch up with the people we love. We are fortunate that we can go such long stretches without needing to work. We are blessed to have family and friends that don’t mind having a few stray humans rooting around in their refrigerators and curling up on their floors to rest their weary heads.