I took off my sandals and stepped one foot onto the cool, damp sand. Looking towards the ocean, I couldn’t make out waves, but they were there. I could hear them. It was two weeks before graduation, and I, alongside six high school friends, walked on a breezy San Francisco evening along the shores of Ocean Beach.

Each of us carried a backpack – the same one we took to school everyday – but for an unspoken reason, tonight, they felt heavier.

We decided on a location, halfway to the water, and placed our belongings on the floor. Soon after, with the help of some logs, the morning’s newspaper and an entire bottle of lighter fluid, a fire was ablaze.

The bonfire.

At first, we sat there and just stared, as is customary with fire. Finally peeling myself away from the mesmerizing swirl of smoke and light and heat, I unzipped my backpack.

“….. ‘kay guys ima do it.”

Eloquence – never my strong suit.

I took out a piece of paper and looked at it – My first Chemistry quiz, administered on the third day of class – a score of 4/13. Sheezus, what a start to sophomore year, I chuckled to myself.

I reached the paper forward, and almost immediately, a corner caught fire. I watched as the flame crept slowly towards my hand and before it could reach my fingertips, released and watched the rest of the quiz descend to ashes.

Others began the same process: reaching into their backpacks, glancing at what they pulled out, occasionally making a snarky comment, then feeding it to the fire. It became almost robotic, these motions.

Robotic, and yet… not. Every action alone was significant – with each a unique sense of release.

I pulled out my AP U.S. History Composition notebook… good god I despised that class. BURN IT.

And so it continued, watching each of our chosen documents swirl to ashes.

The prettiest were the magazine pages……. but boy did they burn the eyes. Their flames may have been beautiful, vibrant and psychedelic… but the fumes, absolutely not. Lesson. Learned.

This graduation bonfire wasn’t my idea – a friend had proposed it – but the concept fascinated me.

Its initial premise: BRING EVERYTHING!!!! ALL OF YOUR NOTEBOOKS AND REPORTS AND FEED THEM TO A GREAT BEACH BONFIRE TO CELEBRATE THE FACT THAT WE’RE FINALLY DONE WITH SCHOOL AND FINALS YIPPEE HOORAY!!!!!!

…… I was not going to bring everything. Never planned on it. That 9 out of 10 I received on a short story from my freshman year English teacher. For months, I didn’t get anything higher than a B- on a single writing assignment. This one breached the A threshold – just barely. It wasn’t perfect, absolutely not, but it was satisfactory –  which was more than I ever expected from Mr. Bonnell. This one I was proud of; this one, a keeper.

No, I would burn the self-proclaimed “shitty things”, the blemishes of my high school past. The cathartic activity of watching negativity turn to dust.

In retrospect, this bonfire was 100% high school teenage angst. I have exactly zero shame admitting that. But you see, I’ve always been a fan of symbolism. The conscious action of doing something that represented far more than face value. No, we weren’t trying to burn away the bad memories so that they ceased to exist. We simply wanted a way to illustrate that they didn’t affect us. These moments should not and will not hold us back in life… This fire represented our earnest desire to move on.

Fast forward almost a decade.

Despite having done some not-so-safe things in my recent past, I still stand by this as one of the craziest decisions I’ve ever made to date: going to Cambodia alone in 2014. My life up to that point was extremely sheltered. I believed getting on the wrong subway line going uptown in Manhattan, landing me in the middle of Harlem, was the absolute end of the world. Yes, I lived in a bubble.

Cambodia, at that time, was beyond bold for me – especially with everything I did there, like tomb-raiding and getting into a random stranger’s car, driving 100 kilometers away from the nearest city to explode a straw hut using an RPG & M60 automatic……

……. But that’s a story for another time.

I think I was a bit shell-shocked (pun intended) after Cambodia. Despite being an amazing trip, it was a lot to handle, physically and mentally. I say this because my next planned trips were to Korea, then the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. What I quickly realized: Left to my own devices I would’ve continued to choose to travel to destinations in Europe or Asia; of course, because I had heard amazing stories from friends and family.

But concurrently amidst these travels, I was extremely humbled by the sheer size of the world. Damn this planet is freaking huge.

Let’s be real: I will never, nor do I plan to, travel to every single country in the world. There are 196; I’ve hit less than 30 so far. Yes, people have done it; yes, I am a dreamer; yes, I am still young. But putting on my “Realist Hat” right now: It ain’t happenin’.

And yet I want semblance of seeing the world.

Unfortunately, the impatient type-A millennial in me wants nothing more that to feel like even if I haven’t done anything productive with my career or life so far, that I’ve at least done it traveling.

So starting late-2015, just in time for my (first) quarter-life crisis (one of many to come),  I added a single item to my ever-growing bucket list. An item that would, for now, trump the rest of them.

I was going to travel to the rest of the 7 continents of the world before turning 27. 

And without skipping a beat, the plan was set in motion. I planned a trip to New Zealand and Australia… then to Zambia, Botswana, Zimbabwe. Continents number 4 and 5. Solid progress in 2016.

But the last two would be tricky… and quite frankly, I lost momentum. At one point in the middle of this year, a sobering thought entered my mind: I might never actually reach this goal. For financial reasons, and for personal.

I’m fully aware how ridiculous and naive all of this may sound to some people. But setting this goal has been such a blessing in retrospect and has ultimately shaped my view of the world. No regrets whatsoever. Would I have considered traveling to New Zealand or Zambia having not set myself on this path? Unlikely. And yet, today I consider New Zealand my favorite country to have explored.

So…… spoiler alert guys, in less than a month, I will do it. 7 continents before 27.

In January, I will fly to Argentina, stay a few nights with penguins at the southern tip of South America, and then take a boat down to my seventh and final continent.

The end of the Earth.

Because this, to me, symbolizes the world itself. Having traveled, albeit for short stints, to each of the seven land masses of the world almost feels like I’ve symbolically seen as much of the world as I could have in my short life thus far.

Because who knows what could happen tomorrow, the next month, the next year? What I fear is regret. So my philosophy? Tackle the bucket list immediately.

Time to carpe some freaking diem.

……………..

My undying fascination with symbolism is one of the reasons why I love the idea of lantern floatings. To write your thoughts and wishes and hopes and dreams and regrets and things left unsaid on a paper lantern. To leave a part of yourself on that lantern. And to illuminate it and watch it float upward, lighter than the atmosphere, going wherever the wind guides it.

With my recent employment status (or lack thereof, ha),  I am that paper lantern… I will go wherever the wind takes me.

And today, this gust… blows me to the end of the earth.

With love,

Mendi

15 Dec This entry was published on December 15, 2016 at 9:37 am. It’s filed under Antarctica, reflection, South America and tagged Antarctica, argentina, solo travel. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.