The Adventure, part 1

In one year, I lost a job, a home, my unemployment benefits, my savings, a best friend, and all vestiges of my previous life. I gained a husband, a stepson, a whole new family, another (completely different) home, and my freedom. All of this because of that crazy-ass road trip.

“But you’re getting married,” you say. “No more hitting the open road on a whim, no more vacationing by yourself in Jamaica. How are you gaining your freedom?”

Getting married is going to be my new adventure, my new declaration of personal independence. I don’t really mourn the loss of my single life. All those years in New York, all those thousands of dates I went on, didn’t yield one worthwhile boyfriend. Not one. (Although there were plenty of worthless ones.) It was hard justifying a slow, sensual life, in which spontaneous travel, long drawn-out meals cooked over many hours, and gardening figured prominently, in a city which prized ruthless speed and ambition over all else. I was tired of being stared down across the table from a date, being judged unfavorably because I wasn’t on the fast track to becoming CEO by 35, because I didn’t work 100 hours a week and make six figures, because I didn’t want to work 100 hours a week.

I was also getting tired of my married/attached girlfriends turning to me for entertainment value. They were living vicariously through my dating adventures, and while I was glad someone was getting some enjoyment out of it, there were some truly terrifying moments. There was the time I woke up to the current man du jour having unprotected sex with me; I never heard from him again, prompting several emergency gynecological visits. There was the lawyer who announced to me, on our second date, that he wanted to fist me. There was the actor who refused to leave my apartment until I gave him a hand job. There were all the now-nameless garden-variety perverts, men who wanted to wear my lingerie or pimp me out, the men who broke my heart in a million different ways, by treating me like shit or breaking up with me via text message or who called me names and laughed at me when they learned I was from the South or who simply disappeared, never to be heard from again.

I won’t miss any of it.

While I know now that the road trip was my elegy to my single life, I didn’t know that at the time. It was an act born of desperation and an irrational fear of stasis. It made no sense at the time to anyone but me. It especially made no financial sense--it cost me over $14,000, during a time when I had no income, no health insurance, and six figures of student loans and credit card debt.

But it brought me everything. America, the love of my life, and me.

(“Oh, there I am! Hello me! I missed you. Where were you all this time?” “Who, me? I was hiding in the open places. All you had to do was look.”)