Claire’s path had been a winding one, a life choice that had brought her both interesting and unexpected experiences and endless frustration from those loved ones who would have preferred it to have some direction and purpose instead. True to the wisdom that not all those who wander are lost she had rambled through life rather than live it, gathering experiences and memories on her path like one picks up souvenirs along one’s journeys. She was old enough by now to open that symbolic box of mixed experiences and try to put them together in a broader context, in order to get the big picture.
It wasn’t easy, the life of a traveler, even in a symbolic sense. Much like the real one, the experiential traveler hunts special moments to capture in pictures, and in the end those pictures become the reality of his or her journey, obscuring the mishaps, the strains and the inescapable human needs. The traveler might remember his disappointments and sorrows but the pictures stand alone to form a different image of one’s life, the image one chose to depict.
The tapestry she came up with as a result was beautiful and strange, and if she wanted to be honest with herself it didn’t make much sense. That’s probably why she had decided to take a sabbatical from normal life, find the missing pieces of the puzzle and put some meaning into this random cluster of events. That is how she ended up coming back to the home of her childhood, the place where things never changed: she needed a fixed point to focus on while this chaotic soup of actions, encounters and events kept swirling around her, so involved in itself it left no room for breathing. Its relentless churning gave her motion sickness and seemed ruled more by the laws of fluid dynamics than by those of human nature - it had eddies and currents and immovable rocks, mucky dead spots and rushing white waters, and places so clear one could count all the pebbles on the rocky bottom and all the creatures who lived there.
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