Vacation Theory
It’s hard to remember how hot feels before it gets hot. I romanticize it. Long for it.
I dreamt about walking in one of my past lives; through the wet air of the streets of Seoul, sticky with summer, the air thick with the scent of rain on asphalt. The ache of being far from an ocean so intense, I once asked a boy I was seeing to take me to water. We arrived at a bridge over the Han river, catching the hot breeze from the water in the darkness. Our hands all over each other, horny with the newness and the ephemeral. I thought about buying a ticket, taking the extensive plane ride, and arriving there as someone else, walking alone down streets from my past, visiting the people who knew me then.
I dreamt of walking through the 10pm twilight of Paris, across the Seine from the 4th to the 5th, using the most famous monuments in the world as my guide. In that summer I’d sometimes stumble over someone I knew laying in front of Notre Dame (this laying in and around cathedral like monuments was a very particular study abroad thing I think) and we’d say hi or join up for the night, staying out until it got light again. There was always so much wine, the cheap stuff from the grocery store drank from the bottle on the street. Always red. Always cigarettes, and stilted half French conversations until words weren’t needed anymore.
I thought a lot about buying a ticket to New York—this former life was very much within reach. It sat on my to do list and I looked at it everyday. And then I was there! The first morning, jetlagged, waiting for a bus, I delighted in everyone yelling at each other (there was a car with a flat in the bus lane so the bus driver laid on the horn while people at the bus stop yelled that she couldn’t move! She had a flat!) It was hot and humid in New York, everyone nearly naked and dewy—everything I had dreamt of!—but the reality is never quite as sweet. I pushed through it, reminding myself to see everything with the rose-colored longing I’d felt.
One night at a full bar I asked two boys if my group of four could join their table. Instead of just taking the space they gave up, I brought them into the fold. I was open. They offered a puff of their joint, I asked what they do. Exterminators in New York City! I begged them for their horror experiences, they dished like we were around a campfire telling ghost stories—I asked them their age and found they were ten years younger, then made them guess everyone’s age in my group. They didn’t know what 37 looks like. My slip skirt was sticking to my thighs, sheer fabric tracing every curve, my face glowing. I felt 28. I didn’t feel like I needed to rush home to complete my skin care routine, or get a perfect night’s sleep.
Vacation Theory is the notion that you are your best self on vacation. Sounds obvious, but not all vacations bring this out of you. A romantic weekend with your partner? Vacation theory doesn’t apply. In contrast, traveling alone or with one friend makes you bolder and more receptive—because you have to be. It’s a survival instinct that kicks in. You’re compelled to make friends for the evening or overnight. You’ll say yes to things you’d typically say no to.
The trick of vacation theory is that it’s not just for spatial travel, it works too for time travel.
Stay with me.
Every few months to a year I’ll receive a thoughtful text from my ex and we’ll go back and forth with long missives for a few days/weeks until everything quiets again. Texting with my ex makes me want to rummage through my closet for a slutty outfit. Makes me want to wax my asshole, get a new lip gloss, get nauseous over the idea of drinks with him, all the things we’re not saying and all the things we could. This is vacation theory applied to visiting a former self. It offers freedom and possibility and opens us up like the raw wound we once were. It’s a vacation that costs us only imagination and a dash of heartache—I do not want to get back together with my ex, to be clear. But entertaining what was and what could have been or mayyyybe, maybe still could be…makes me feel alive with a potent mix of nostalgia and fantasy.
This is definitely heightened in the summer, and likely due to my uprooting to a new city—I’ve been in a near constant state of time traveling to past relationships and encounters and versions of myself. In an attempt to organize my internal wanderings, I was inspired to the task of writing a list like piece of everyone I’ve ever been intimate with. A few sentences of memorial; an intimate inventory. As detailed or brief as I felt inspired by the memory. To All The Men I’ve (Never) Loved, I’d call it. (And I still want to do this!) But first—
As I had begun toying with this concept of past lives (and really for erotica purposes, our past loves) the film Past Lives entered my sphere of knowledge. It bamboozled me a little—had this concept been implanted in me subliminally from a movie billboard or is this a universal experience I was having taking place at the same time?
What was at first a question soon became the only answer—I convinced myself I had to see the movie to know how to proceed with my exploration (I’m not one for spoilers so I avoided figuring this out the easy way and PS some very light spoilers in the next two paragraphs for Past Lives, go see it!)
By now, the heat has hit and it’s suffocating. Appetite murdering, brain numbing. It’s the perfect weather for a matinee movie. So I went: the movie was sweet and sad and wistful. I found myself smiling with them, like I too was goofy and in love again. I found myself intensely hoping, needing the characters to finally slam their bodies together, how could they not? I’ve never shared sparks with a person and not tasted them somehow. Shivering under my sarong wrapped over my body like a snuggie, I mourned the fact that I don’t have anyone to reunite with unexplored, but that’s the kinda impulsive slut that I am. Past Lives touched on a lot of my feelings around ~Vacation Theory~ namely, the allure of possibility vs reality, the entertainment of wondering what could have been, and spending time with a person who knows a version of you who you’re not anymore—but the most interesting part of the film took me in a bit of a different direction.
A thread through the movie is the Korean concept in-yeon: the belief that if you meet someone it means you also met or shared a space or rubbed shoulders in a past life. And that our lovers and partners are those that we’ve encountered 8,000 times or more. The idea is heavy on fate and in the movie, they oscillate between discrediting the concept and honoring it. I consider myself a pretty practical person, but the idea of fate is something I’ve applied to every romantic entanglement and brief drunken kiss I’ve ever been a part of, always grasping for meaning, thinking this could be the one. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer and I love a good story?
Though I’ve attempted to make numerous relationships feel fateful, I’ve truly had that powerful feeling that something is ~meant to be~ with only two of the extensive list of my life’s loves. The ones I didn’t force, they just unfolded, sexy and perfect until they weren’t. One ended worse than the other. One broke me in a fiercer way than any others exactly because it felt so fateful. I don’t entertain it much now, or think about him with regret, but I did for a long time after I ended it. I was stuck in an endless what if loop, romanticizing the fuck out of the possibilities, knowing I could never go back.
From my diary, a year after the break up, circa 2013:
“I know loneliness. And I am swimming in it.
This is the summer, that season that seemed almost never-ending with him, one vacation after another. I am missing him again and it is a haunting return of a feeling I finally felt I had let slip away from me.
In this season I breathe him. And our old life. One that he has definitely continued living, only for me it is something of the past. I begin to remember all the possibilities, how suddenly everything made sense in my life, as if everything I ever wanted had just found me, scooped me up, and promised to be mine forever. I hate the possibilities. I hate the nameless baby that ruined our possibility. I hate the laughter I laughed when I saw the pregnancy test. I hate how strong I was for him, how trusting and how he couldn’t be strong enough for me.”
So I invite you to write: Go on a mental vacation to a past life. Write about a past lover. Imagine what could have been—write the life you would have even if you know you don’t want it. Write about the pain of it ending and stealing all your possibilities. Or, dive into a lighter writing exercise: inventory your lovers. Write it like a numbered list with only a couple sentences describing them, or get into the lovely sexy details of your love.
This month’s writing workbook includes questions like: What's the weather like where you are? What would make it perfect—a couple degrees? A body of water just outside your door? Describe your ideal climate and place for this moment.
And I think! Hope! The workbook is where this will all come together and take you on the journey I’ve been journeying.