Wandering is something I've done from as far as I can remember. Being an only child, I spent a lot of time alone. I needed time alone, to infiltrate my thoughts, to learn about myself. It's a sort of mediation. The funny thing about being an only child is that you don't have an example to compare yourself to, like I imagine you would with siblings. Being an introvert, you often have to "guess" what normal behavior is. To this day, I still need to ask myself, or others, if that way I am feeling or responding is "normal social behavior". Sometimes even the idea of exerting social energy seems so exhausting. There's a performance element that comes with social interaction that can become so tedious, that sometimes I'd almost just rather stay inside my own head, un-judged.
I wander alone, and with music. Music has always increased the enjoyment of flowing thoughts and dreams. Both positive and negative. Music is the perfect anti-drug.
I wandered to Los Angeles in 2011 to write, convinced that the paradox city of angels would influence my writing. I wandered to escape, and I escaped to explore. I explored so I could write. I wrote so that I could understand what I felt. And so on, and so on. All I really accomplished in LA was the worst hangover of my life.
When I returned home to Toronto, I felt like I was crashing for weeks thereafter. I felt unsatisfied entirely in which the city I lived. The busy, unnecessarily entitled aggressive overachievers. The cold concrete jungle. The highrises. The condominiums. The condominiums where perfectly good plots of land used to be. The construction. The lack of color and flare. The grey and silver lining, instead of the green and desert lining. The botanical danger. Were the heat was warm, but not humid enough to fuck up my hair. The hills that seemed to hug from every angle, assuring that there's no other place worth being.
I felt homesick for a place I've never even lived.