*image via Unsplash
Have you noticed most of the so-called great road trip movies all star men as their leads? With the exception of the frankly brilliant ‘Thelma and Louise’, the more recent ‘Wild’ and possibly Crossroads – though I question the quality of that film (despite the fact that Not A Girl (Not Yet A Woman) is an a m a z i n g song), I can’t actually think of any more.
“…I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…”
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
I am obsessed with Sylvia Plath quote. There’s a small pipe dream that makes me want to live out this fantasy of dropping everything and hitchhiking my way around the world. ‘So, why don’t you do it then, Ria?’ Well…Job? Money? Visas? Logistics? Safety? The later is my biggest pet peeve (but I’ll leave my feminist rants on that for another day).
But there’s just something about that romanticised imagery of the long, winding and empty road. The dirt trail kicking up behind you and the sun rising over the horizon line in plain sight. Or the sprawling city of a million people and a million stories just waiting to be discovered down alleyways, tucked away in side streets or hidden in the corner of coffee shops and bodegas.
Sometimes you wonder whether you’ll see any of that. Whether you’ll experience the same elation, the same rush they so eloquently communicated in the pages of their journals so many years ago.
Maybe one day I’ll take a leap of faith into the unknown.
*image via Unsplash
Or maybe I’ll just settle for living vicariously through Instagram and Pinterest photos for now…or I could rewatch Thelma and Louise again.
Ria
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