Seventeen, three months before my aunt and I board a plane from LaGuardia to Rome, I am sunk into a corner of the couch, hunched over my laptop exploring Turkey electronically. We have options, here, though the horseback tour of an Izmir beach is too much for her. The air conditioned bus ride of Istanbul, or the tour that drops us at the Grand Bazaar for three hours, opening up an expanse of hand-stitched purses and painted bracelets.
"We should be different people on the cruise," my aunt Shannon says. She's here in Georgia with me to see my graduation and help plan the finer details--excursions, transportation--for our upcoming two week trip to Europe. It will be the first time, in my memory, that we will spend a vacation with just the two of us. Every weekend of my childhood, my aunt Coll helped me tie my beauty pageant dresses or my aunt Tracy took me to Splish Splash. Shannon, though she lived in our basement apartment until we moved to Georgia two years prior, was loved but distant. On Christmas she would help me make donuts in a new Easy Bake oven. At Christmas parties, she tumbled down the stairs after too many beers. Some nights, she called me on the phone from the basement to ask I liked any boys yet, every word a slow slide into the next.
I don't understand what she means, that we should be other people. "Ya know, different people at dinner. Tell them you're--the daughter of a wealthy orange grove owner. I'm your publicist because you have a book coming out about--about the fashion company you started at fifteen that quickly went under."
I suspect, though, that this gestures at the sense that we're different people when we travel anyway, particularly if/when we try to speak another language. Personalities change when filtered through other languages. Or maybe learning a language is like trying to rediscover yourself after years of speaking. It's as if you're chasing who you are in that new language but never, of course, reach that point.
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