Selina Xu

The whole affair is impromptu. On Tuesday I feel the burning urge to go somewhere. On Wednesday I buy a flight ticket. On Thursday morning I’m tucked into a plane seat. By myself. Hurtling towards Yogyakarta, an ancient capital on Java island.

When I land, miss my train, and am instructed to wait four hours for the next one, the trip begins to feel like an ordeal. Never before have I been in such a state of constant heightened awareness of my skin and body. Safety, safety, safety, the mantra is carved into my brain by a million admonishments and headlines. As I negotiate for cab fare by the road and wait in line for an hour in a restaurant that understands no English, as I dash across highways teeming with cars and ride a trishaw through a tsunami of motorcycles to get to the night market, I take pains to exude calmness: I’m a woman on a mission. Any hint of being lost that slips through the cracks can be bait for malintent.

The whole of Day 1 I don’t see a single face like mine. My short curly hair is a neon sign in a sea of hijabs. Every second of anonymity in a foreign land thrums with overtones of hypervisibility.

By Day 2, I start to relax, surrounded by a milieu of foreign faces and tongues in Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist temple. My bamboo slippers crunch on stone steps, tracing the same path up to the mandala of stupas that many have walked for over a millennium. My fingers touch the walls, rubbed smooth by a thousand palms. Difference disappears before the face of faith and the immensity of history. Beheaded buddhas sit bereft, torsos galore in the courtyard — heads strewn across the globe by the hands of colonialism — the sign of a civilization’s deep, aching loss.

There too is beauty in such bare loss. At sunset, I wander around the ruins of Prambanan, ravaged by time and awash by the gentle hands of light. The place is silent from the hubbub of tourists. For a brief heartbeat, I feel like I’m the only person standing in the forgotten footnotes of history. Then a golf cart chugs past.

To travel is to allow yourself to be humbled, I think.

Day 3 starts with a descent 60 meters deep into a cave. We climb down slippery, moss-covered rocks, trek through mud, and arrive at the bottom of a sinkhole, created by limestone that was uplifted from the sea floor about 1.8 million years ago. A distant underground river gurgles. Sweat drips down from under my helmet. My eyes adjust to the darkness. Then comes light.

The whole day feels like an unlikely, spontaneous outing in someone else’s skin — another Me. I’m usually the kind of traveler who wakes up at noon, eats a late brunch, wanders around air-conditioned museums, and hides in the shade licking a gelato. Instead, I’m now doing some kind of tomb raider-level of adventure: Caves. Mud. Sea. Tightrope. Cliffs. Crashing Waves. 

Later, on the back of an open-air jeep streaking past jungles and thatched huts toward the sea, the smell of burning banana leaves mixing with the wind rustling my hair, I ask the driver, “Can I stand?” He hums yes. 

Shakily but surely I stand up. Before me, the road stretches out like a yellow belt till where land meets sea. Foliage and stray branches overhead sweep over my hair. Under my hands the jeep jolts with every bump on the road, like a panting beast. The wind streaks past, fast and ticklish. I whoop in delight. I want to smile at every stranger, so I do.

A weight lifts and my mind clears. A thousand little agonies vanishing in the breeze: how to act, who to be, regrets, what-ifs, if-onlys. Afraid of being too much — or not enough. Too fat, too different, too timid, too entitled, too complacent.

But there on the jeep, I touch the contours of another self: more joyous without need for reason; more celebratory of her own existence in and of itself, without needing any observer. 

The joy is overflowing. I brim over like a vessel. Something bursts through the seams. I am incandescent.

It takes traveling by myself to another land to realize why I had to do so: alone and anonymous, I can be any version of myself I want to be. 

Back from my impromptu vacation, my friend at the office murmurs, “You have more ‘fuck it’ energy now. I can sense it on you.”

She’s right.