Wonders

A year after my dad died, I found myself standing on a beach in Vietnam at 5am, watching waves stirred up by an incoming typhoon, asking myself a question I'd been avoiding for years: what if this is all there is?I booked one trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. Four months and twenty-four countries later, I came home someone else entirely. This is that story - the real one, not the highlight reel. I met Eddie on a bus outside Hanoi, three days into a holiday I nearly didn't book.
Six months after that, I was standing in front of the Taj Mahal wondering if love was actually supposed to feel this steady. Somewhere in between, I stood at all four of the Great Wonders - the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, the Colosseum, and the Taj Mahal - and found a version of myself in each one that grief and twenty years of putting everyone else first had quietly buried. I've tried to keep this honest.
There's a smashed coffee table and an altitude-sick meltdown in Cusco. There's a grief thread that never really resolves, because grief doesn't work that way, no matter how far you fly from it. There's also monkeys stealing sunglasses, deep-fried guinea pig, and a Bridge of Sighs that somehow followed me across three different continents. And there's Eddie - who never once asked me to be smaller, and who taught me that "I'll figure it out" is a very different sentence to "we will figure it out."If you've ever wondered whether "someday" needs to become "now" - this is for you.
I'm not going to pretend I had it all figured out before I left. I just went anyway. You don't need your whole life sorted to start living it. You just need to book the flight.