A list of things to accomplish someday, a to-do list for a dreamer like me:
- Move to Paris on a whim. Live in a walk-up apartment and fill it with roses. Wander all over the city on foot. Spend the days reading Rimbaud in the Jardin des Tuileries. Drink your weight in red wine accompanied by a French boy with a dimpled smile. Let him buy you a ticket to the Musee d’Orsay to see the Impressionists whom you love so much. Take a Polaroid of him as he reaches for your hand to pull you under the covers. Wake up early and sit on the wrought-iron balcony in your underwear holding an unlit cigarette. Never light the cigarette.
- Fly to Australia and stay in a youth hostel with turquoise walls on the New South Wales coastline. Walk the dusty road to the beach every morning and then float on your back in the ocean looking at the sky. Drink smoothies for every meal. Scratch at your mosquito bites. Make friends with the surfers and start to talk like them. Wear only a bikini no matter the time of day, and then leave for Thailand when you feel like the Aussie sun has bleached your soul.
- Take a road trip to California with your best friend via every state possible. Stay in cheap motels and keep cash tucked in the waistband of your cutoffs. Drive down the highway through fields and meadows and mesas and canyons. Sing along to Creedence at the top of your lungs. Wear your sunglasses like armor. Communicate with no one but each other and a ouija board you keep in the trunk of the convertible. Eventually make it to the city of angels and take up residence in the fanciest hotel in Beverly Hills so that you can nab the travel-size shampoo bottles. Charge your stay to a dormant credit card.
- Cross over from Gibraltar to Morocco on a foggy day so that Africa sneaks up on you. Let a storyteller at the market in Marrakech recount folktales to you in a language you don’t speak. Understand him anyway because of his hand gestures. Haggle over a carpet at the souk. Give up on it. Buy a cup of mint tea instead. Go back and buy the rug anyway, and ship it home. Wonder when you’ll be home.
- Ride the Trans-Siberian Railway through seven time zones. Befriend your fellow passengers and share dumplings and vodka with them. Watch the sun rise over Asia and set over Europe. Wear six layers of clothing and shiver anyway. Get yelled at by elderly ticket-collectors for trying to surreptitiously sketch their portraits in charcoal. Apologize in broken Russian. Go back to your cabin and be mesmerized by the blur of snowy trees passing by the window. Eat caviar from a tin at 3 in the morning.
- Take a boat down the Amazon River and watch for the macaws hiding in the canopy. Sleep on a hammock and feel like you’re swimming in the humidity. See frogs and monkeys and birds and butterflies you never knew existed. Fish for piranhas. Return to Rio de Janeiro but still hear phantom sounds of the jungle in your head. Stare up at the statue of Christ the Redeemer and feel tiny in comparison, then go lie on the beach and feel impossibly big next to the grains of sand.
