A Love Story

Kathmandu, Nepal

The best travel adventures are love stories in disguise. They leave us with a similar sense of the sublime, the joy and the wonder — and when all is said and done, that same lingering ache. For me, traveling embodies a delicate dance with loving and letting go. There are cities I enter to which I will never return — and I make peace with the inevitable transience of my days. But every once in a while, I find places that, like the most delicate of lovers, implant themselves onto my poetic memory, and once the metaphor is born, I can never quite leave them behind.

I can tell you about the fantasy of my ways, about how the smallest things resurrect the memory of this morning in Pasupatinath. I can tell you about the feeling of gliding my bare feet across the wet concrete, the smell of the wheatgrass intertwined with the potency of the fumes, and the kites I saw flying amid the rush of the early morning traffic. I can tell you about the melodies I still wake up singing in its memory, in my quiet apartment in San Francisco.

There are some places that are harder to let go of than others. They leave you fundamentally altered. They are the love stories from which you never quite return.