NEW ISSUE: “Whoosh, the doors open and you find yourself in an alien landscape”

Ed’s Note

Every time I make my way out of an airport, past the glaring uniformity of these in-between places that could be anywhere and nowhere in the world, and enter the rush of the newly formed outside, I blink with astonishment at the miracle of modern travel. It’s crazy wonderful and I don’t think I will ever tire of this miracle. 

Consider the fact that you spend a defined period of time in a tin can in the sky, in varying states of suspended animation depending on your proclivities and susceptibility to sleeping pills, on a long haul during which you may or may not catch sight of the mysterious lands beneath you — you may as well be catching sight of an abstract-expressionist painting for all of the information you glean from 30 000 feet.

And then, after a strange interlude with a uniformed agent who asks existential questions while glancing doubtfully from your credentials to your face and back again, requiring that you assert your identity — yes, I really exist, it is me and I really am this very person it says I am in this document here — whoosh, the doors open and you find yourself in an alien landscape.  A mind-boggling, fully formed alternate universe, full of other people, other lives, other habits, other coffee, all of their otherness rubbing up against all of yours. And all of this other has ostensibly been carrying on without you all this time. All of these lives being lived in parallel. If ever there was a case for the multiverse, this is it.

I confess I get this rush just going from Joburg to Cape Town. It’s bizarre. It’s wonderful, it’s delightful, and it’s humbling. Unless you come to this other place often, it is unlikely that anyone here knows your name or gives two hoots about your existence. You may as well not exist. Pinch yourself to make sure.  What happens when this feeling gets hold of me is that I immediately set about forming the habits of a new life.

A new identity in this otherness. I find a coffee shop I can return to tomorrow morning and pretend the barista knows me — by day four there is a sudden dawning of familiarity. I begin to pick out the paths I would be treading if I lived here, little daily rituals emerge spontaneously. I scope out the neighbourhood I would settle in, the grocery store I might frequent, the clothes shop where I would buy the uniform of the new place, the apartments I would pick. In short order, I seek out all the many ways I would become of this place. 

Travel is like a weird exercise in identical twin studies — this other me and I, sharing all our genetic material but separated by location and chance. Same same, but so different if she had lived in Paris, or Jaipur, or Shanghai. It’s a compulsive imagining, a gift. Every transition from the airport to the new place is a chance to subtly shift the vice grip of identity and all the things we think we need to hold tight to make sense of ourselves in time and space. “You never step in the same river twice,” said Heraclitus. Damn right — but I am not so sure about the airport.

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Aspasia

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