traveling

i find it impossible to prepare for a trip all at once. i need time, long lengths of it, give me a year, tell me we will make a trip in a year and i will spend every day of it, learning to leave the place i am in, so that i will have made the trip already before the trip has begun, so that i am always traveling, so that i don't have to begin traveling --

how is it possible for a place to invade you? i can picture the landscapes of bangladesh in my eyes now. the cold sweaty windows, the hordes of people, my quiet relatives. my cousin with pale skin and dark eyes and a disapproving mouth. my little cousins who have grown up to become strangers, the suitcases we will take with clothes which i don't normally wear. there is such a nakedness in traveling, an absolute vulnerability, to be exposed to some place so entirely new that it becomes like a sound reverberating in the hollows of your ears, so full like a bite --

every moment has a different texture. waking up to a different sunrise, to different sounds. every moment is so pregnant with the alterity of the life i normally lead, the patterns i have learnt to sway with.

yet when i return, everything will taste brighter and sharper. all this dread, and all these words will have shrunk into wisps of smoke, like a dying fire, full with secrets of the burning.