the guilty conscience
i am currently writing this in my seat on my direct flight to lisbon. i am off to do another little adventure. this one is way less flushed out than my previous winter trip, partially due to me being overwhelmed with the amount of time ill be spending away, and partially due to wanting a get away from everything. i am going to save the updates for another day.
im sitting in my seat right now listening to amoeba by clairo. it sits on every single travel playlist i make. its a song about realizations of your past where you were down the wrong road and hope that your future self wont make the same mistakes. i think back to the last time i was in a plane listening to this song, which would have to be last year when i went on my little central europe tour. my central europe last winter was a direct by product of my mental boom around that time.
i had originally planned to go back to serbia for a bit and visit family and see my grandparents who were pretty sick (my grandmother nearly going into a diabetic coma and my grandfather and his dementia alzheimers combo). i was dreading visiting my family. living apart from extended family brings with it a huge sense of guilt for me. knowing that when i come back things are usually talked about being better than they actually are. theres this pressure internally to "fix" things while youre there; give money to your relatives that are struggling, take care of your elderly relatives, provide some sort of emotional support. not to mention the need to catch up on everything youve missed since you last came because not everyone likes to air dirty laundry on whatsapp.
after struggling with finishing a full course load and an internship the last thing i wanted to do was spend three weeks sitting around feeling unwarrented guilt. as much as i used to love my grandparents, cousins' aunts and uncles, quite honestly, its depressing being around them. i loathed having to lay around my grandparents' apartment and take care of them while they had covid. i hated the atmosphere of helplessness in that apartment as they got sicker and sicker. needing to take bills out my grandfathers wallet when paying since he'd insist to pay but couldnt count properly due to his dementia. i think that most of these feelings turned into resentment by the month i was supposed to go. i ended up cancelling my tickets that december i was supposed to leave.
the thought to go to central europe was a one off decision. i had all this free time and money from a freshly cancelled ticket and needed to get away for a bit. i wanted to run away from toronto, from all the guilt of avoiding my family, from the rotting in my bedroom, from the loneliness of having nobody around. it sounds stupid and a tad selfish looking back, but im glad i chose myself.
sitting on my flight to prague and listening to amoeba felt like every single problem in my life was solved. ill be honest, if youre travelling, and especially alone, dont expect any of your personal issues to magically dissapear. the first few days in prague and vienna felt whimsical and full of awe， enough to ignore the little inklings of my problems back home. but soon enough theyll reappear and youll be no happier than if you were at home, its as if these feelings get stronger. for me at least, it was the third or fourth day in vienna when the sense of guilt came back.
thinking of my grandfather most of all and knowing that he'd probably be gone before the next winter, i ended up calling my aunt from vienna and told her where i was and that i was going to cut my time in budapest short to come down and see the family. (she ended up joining me in budapest then we drove down together
sitting on a bench in a park in vienna after that i remember just bawling my eyes out for a half hour. it was an intense day and everything felt like it was piling on, so the cathartic public bench cry was required. my trio was pretty fine up to that point, but once i let the guilt set in it felt like it was over for me. i dont have many pictures after that day, i pretty much clocked out for most of it. i dont regret going, but i regret letting my guilty conscience guide me.
this time around, the guilt is still a teensy bit there, but i dont think its to the magnitude of me going back home again. last year turned me off completely from going back there alone, and ive told my parents that i dont plan to see my grandmother for reasons outside this post. maybe i need to be a bit more selfish with the way i go about things...