Anywhere But Here

As is to be expected, I am working on my personal statement for the umpteenth time, now distracted while writing about travels in Europe.  Let me out!  I want to get away from Seattle and the monotony that is my life.  I have visions of myself in Budapest, on Castle Hill overlooking the Danube, dripping sweat in the morning and dodging hailstones in the afternoon.  I see myself in Tarifa as I shield my eyes from the sun, looking across the strait of Gibraltar to hazy Morocco, where the Mediterranean and the Atlantic meet, the wind whipping the sand against my skin with a gentle violence found only in nature.  It's Christmas Eve and I'm in Lisbon, cobbled streets lit with thousands of tiny lights as multitudes of people laugh and talk, bustling past, small puffs of breath slowly dissipating in the clean, icy air; I stand transfixed, smelling, feeling, hearing the spirit of the city.

I want to be there now.  Anywhere but here.  More and more frequently, I find myself daydreaming about traveling.  Partially, it's an escape from the many things I dislike about my life right now.  This will be my first Northwest winter in two years, and it's going to be a hard one.  Mostly, traveling is the one thing that I can think of that would make me happy right now, that I would want to be doing.  I suppose I'll need to be a bit more creative.