My heart sings a song of wanderlust – a desire for the exotic, the unfamiliar, a need to feel like the other and not the I. 

Home, though delightful, feels heavy these days.

These walls are solid and safe, well known every inch.

I long for the strange. 

I long for unexpected angles and curves, passages that take me to vistas unimagined.   I want us to be a couple on a rue in Paris, a calle in Barcelona, an alley in Istanbul.  Walking where feet have trod for hundreds and hundreds of years – not just a couple of centuries. I want to curl up with you in a glass igloo in Norway and watch the northern lights. I want to hold your hand in a bure in Fiji, the thatch rustling0 in the ocean breeze.

I want architecture that begs for our attention and the camera’s lens.  Adobe, stucco, marble.  People who walk differently and speak in a tongue I can’t understand.  I want to eat food I’ve never had in Afghanistan, drink liqueurs with the locals in Greece, and witness the traumatic running of the bulls.  I want to struggle with the language when asking a stranger to take our photo.  Though we are disheveled and jet-lagged, you will put your arm around me and we will smile for the camera capturing our joy in the moment.

I want the Maldives, German Oktoberfest, and the celebrated pigs of Papua, New Guinea.  I want the lights of Hong Kong and the tea houses of Tokyo.  A book store in Scotland.  The American Café in Mumbai.

And then when we are spent.  When the idea of home becomes appealing again, let us board a plane, wait in airports, and rub bleary eyes as we travel back to the same old same old.

When we are home, after we have showered, and after we have collapsed on the sofa and are looking at our stack of luggage, let me recite to you a poem by my good friend:

I thinks
one reason
I be leavin'
alla time
is 'cause
the comin' home
feel
so good

--Kirk Judd