Come Back Alive

by Crystal Potts (United States of America)

A leap into the unknown USA

Sometimes travel is dangerous for a woman. Sometimes travel is sketchy cabdrivers with questionable morals and dodgy hotels with questionable cleanliness and long dark alleys with questionable ends. Women who travel alone sometimes don’t come back alive…but sometimes, they do. Sometimes, a timid 20 year-old college girl can stumble out of a bar in one of the many damp, dark corners of Edinburgh at an ungodly hour of the night/morning with only the vaguest notion of how to get back to her temporary home in this city. Sometimes a girl can, by the grace of God, choose the right direction and begin a long, cold walk down the worn cobblestone streets and marvel at her smallness and newness compared to the monoliths of stone towering above her. She can smell the yeasty bread and spent grain wafting out from the pubs and distilleries and the heady scent of ancient damp earth that is Edinburgh. She can be scared of the dark and the great maw of history can threaten to consume her in a city so steeped in legend and she can chide herself for not being more cautious as she wanders, in the dark, alone. But sometimes in the dark - alone - she can feel, not fear, but pure unadulterated joy and wonder. She can also, eventually, find herself back in the safety of her lost hotel. But more than that, she can find herself empowered. Sometimes a cocky 25 year-old woman studying abroad can follow a whim and find herself in Prague for the weekend. She can find herself in a questionable hostel where all of the linens smell like urine and she can definitely sometimes question her life choices. She can look around at a room full of young men and women who, though share her interest in travel, may not share her interest in hygiene and safety. She can listen to the rumors and make her way to the train station where the little old ladies with rooms to rent gather to hawk their spare rooms to travelers without accommodations. She can follow an elderly woman who speaks no English but holds a handwritten sign “rooms to rent” out of the train station, her knitted shawl wrapped tightly around her wiry shoulders, her head covered with a traditional Czech headscarf, all the way across town, through mid-evil majesty and dark dodgy alleys. She can emerge into a stone courtyard surrounded by central European apartments and be shown to a cozy, clean room far more secure and no more expensive than the rank, overcrowded hostel she left behind. She can tuck herself into the old but cozy twin bed in her little haven and find herself content. Sometimes an unsettled 35 year-old wife and mother can find herself awake in the middle of the night in a swanky London hotel wondering how she got so far from who she used to be. She used to travel alone. She used to be so capable, so adventurous. No more a single woman and not nearly as free as the last time she set foot on this continent, she can decide the jet-lag has set in for the night, slip out of bed, leaving her husband sleeping peacefully, and let herself out the room. She can have a drink in the hotel bar and then step out the hotel doors to wonder at the walled garden across the road. A walled English garden is beautiful and private - separated from the rest of the world by its wall, yet still thriving and growing within those boundaries. Sometimes a girl can draw a parallel between her own life and the life growing before her and find herself, finally, at peace. Sometimes when a woman puts her fear on hold and takes a leap into an unknown part of her world she finds she comes back more than just alive. Sometimes she comes back more alive than she ever was before.