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My First Solo Trip

I am a motherfucking world traveler. Or at least, I became one. That much wasn’t evident when my body began to shake about. I figured this was a whole twenty-minute episodic arc but in reality, it happened a few seconds, time swinging back and forth like a pendulum. I felt the blood rush up and then… THUD! Smacking hard on the ground, I looked into the peering light coming out the bathroom stall, you know the area underneath the doorway, it matched nicely with the level of my eyes. 

“Man, that was weird. How did that happen?” I shuffled about in my head but physically I remained laying there lifeless. Staring under bathroom doors was never up there on my bucket list, but I guess it would be the first thing I’d check off.

“I’m on the ground”, I thought. ‘Yeah obviously, Jackass,” I added. My internal bickering didn’t make things clearer. Either way, you slice it, I didn’t find myself back up until the clattering of feet behind me alerted my ears.

It was a ten-hour flight or so and all I wanted to do was use the toilet. ‘Can’t even do that right”, I thought. “And now look what you did. You embarrassed us in front of the whole plane.” 

Strangers’ opinions mattered to me more than anything else of course. The funny thing is I could tell it was coming when my stomach went to war with the rest of my body. I felt like my belly button had become the eye of the hurricane. Only moments later, I fell. The nice guy sitting next to me blurted out in my defense. “Hey! We need some help down here!”

  Just then, I was plopped down in one of the back-row seats by the Norwegian steward. A cold can of Fanta orange was going to be my remedy it seemed. Flight sickness was the culprit he said. Ten hours is long, after all. I was still spinning internally, unsure of what had just happened. Was I just out for an instant, or was it minutes, or hours? There was no way to tell how much time had passed through the discomforting blackness out the windows. They wrapped me in a towel and told me it would all be fine. Did I believe them? Probably yes. I didn’t know. It was all new to me at that point.

France

Despite technically planning this trip for about a year or so, I never really felt ready, and never really knew what I was getting myself into. Traveling always had an appeal to me but more in the abstract sense, like ‘the world is cool so no duh seeing the world is fun’. Yet, that’s what everyone thinks. Thing is, going overseas wasn’t even technically new for me either. I had been to Germany many times with family at that point but this was going to be my first solo trip.

The lack of an EU passport prevented me from staying too long, as the original plan had been six months. I finished my high school tenure the year before and with it, four straight years of French would be put to the ultimate test. Unsure of what I wanted to do with myself, it seemed like a golden plan. My dad pushed for it of course. He was a francophile and figured it would be a better experience than going straight into deep student debt in the States. To this day, I wonder how things would have gone had I been a good boy and gone straight to school. But I graduated in June 2017 and I made acquaintance with the airplane’s floor in April 2018, so what gives?