“I’m looking for someone. I travel.”

For the last 6 years, though I rented two apartments, I’ve largely been “location independent” (many people seem to dislike the term “digital nomad” — do you? I like it but am trying to adapt.) A woman reached out to me on Instagram, hoping to interview “exceptionally mobile individuals” for her PhD thesis. Sexy! So I’m trying that term out.

I applied for a remote job this past week to teach more classes at the online university I’ve been teaching at since 2017. I haven’t stepped foot in a physical classroom since December 2017, and I have never worked a 9 to 5. I’m untethered to one location, and that’s one reason why I’m able to do this weird “travel dating” thing that I spent so much of 2024 doing. But it has to stop. [Insert dramatic sigh here.]

This summer, I spent two and a half months living and working from my laptop in New Orleans, Richmond, Chicago, nearly the whole of Croatia, and Lausanne. I’m finally back in Paris. Last Monday I went to Au Chat Noir for the weekly Anglophone poetry reading series, Spoken Word Paris. En route, I ran into Matthieu, who lives in my building and owns a wine bar on our street, La Cale, the best wine bar in tout Paris in my opinion, and his girlfriend. It was my first time seeing him outside of the 19th! There we all were, in the 10th!

And then I walked into Au Chat Noir where I bisou-ed Jason, Antonia, Leslie, Chris, Biba, Carrie, Yann, Amanda, Bruce, and E.K. In short, all the poet-friends.

It’s as if I live in Paris! As if I’ve created a whole life here!

Since I’ve been back, when my friends ask, “How was your summer?” I say, “It was horrible. The worst. But the best part were the two weeks I spent in Croatia.” (I made an Instagram reel, if you want the highlights.) Thank the goddesses, really, for Dennis (“Ivan”), who so generously invited me to Croatia and Switzerland when I cut my trip to the US short after a rather disastrous romantic failure.

Twice now in 2024 I have put a lot of effort into getting myself next to a man who I thought really liked me and wanted to be with me, only to discover I was wrong. And Dennis has become a kind of refuge, though I’m sure this is not what any man really wants to be.

Why do I do this? Well, because I’m an “exceptionally mobile individual” and because of a Marguerite Duras quote. (More on that in a bit.)

But my exhausting peripatetic dating has got to stop. My friends are sick of my patterns. I’m sick of my patterns. So, no more. But, two things:

1. I keep coming back to something my very wise poet-publisher-photographer-artist friend Megan Burns said to me once in a text message: “If you want these types of adventures, you have to be realistic about the other types of people who might also want this.” (The obvious answer: very avoidant men, which makes my little avoidant heart just go wild with desire.)

2. Biba said to me at Au Chat Noir, of the New Orleans fiasco, “Of course we all knew it wasn’t going to work out. But you were so excited, how could we have told you? You were doing too much to make it work. You were trying too hard.”

Y’all, I tried to manifest love. I really did. But all I’ve manifested are men in a few different countries who are sweet, beautiful, sexy, a touch disappointed with life, generous in whatever ways they can be — and absolutely not emotionally available at all.

Am I manifesting this because I, too, am emotionally closed-off? Possibly, yeah. But I feel like I’ve moved mountains (and moved myself) to meet these men where they are at. And then when I do, it’s crickets. Or confusion. Or worse, tears.

No, worse is when I feel a real sense of shame in being so alone at 40.

Sometimes, when I’m at my lowest, I think horrible things. Like one night this past March in Calistoga, California, after Anna’s 40th, I walked myself back to the hotel room I was sharing with Juley and I just thought to myself, over and over, “You waited too long, and now nobody fucking wants you.” That is the refrain that runs through my head when I am feeling my most woe-is-me. (This is also absolutely not true. Just a dark thought. We all have them!)

Dating, my friends, is brutal — brutal and, I have to admit, astonishing. Astonishing to meet these humans I have no business meeting, whose lives are so different from my own. I am astonished and grateful that they open their lives, homes, whole worlds to me. I really love how much we humans trust each other, and the people I’ve encountered are always lovely, and that is astonishing, too.

But the brutality? It’s not entirely because of rejection. Dating is brutal because you start to really care. You get attached. I care about “Lucien,” I care about Wes, I care about Dennis. I care about these men so much that I want them to be happy with the right woman, even if it’s not me, or I wish that I could be that woman for them, that I could become her. I also care about the other men I’ve dated in France, most of whom I think of as actual friends — the sad, sexy French dads, the off-and-on German man, the Czech man. (I’ll tell you about them another time.) But lately I wonder if some of these friends of mine don’t just see me as a fairly promiscuous former fling with whom they can have a casual liaison if they catch me at the right moment.

I think the trick in dating is to not take things too personally. It’s very hard for me to stay mad or hold a grudge. I forget. What a gift! Life’s too short to be angry! Life’s too short to wonder why someone doesn’t want you.

And yet. I have made myself so easy for these men.

* * *

Once I wrote a poem. It just came out of me, completely formed and absolutely true:

I have made myself small, foldable. Quick to pack a carry-on, quick to say yes. Small enough to slide beneath the seat of a man’s life.

I’ve said this before and I’ll keep saying it: I have no kids, ex-husband, pets, car, furniture, responsibilities, debt, job in one location, or actual problems. A plastic IUD lodged in my uterus means I don’t have to worry about pregnancy or periods. My most pressing need is wi-fi.

I act like this makes me a “catch.” I think it might make me luggage.

But I molded myself into this role.

* * *

It all started with a Marguerite Duras book, The Sailor From Gibraltar, which I read in Marseille in October of 2018. One sentence (in translation, désolée) in particular:

I romanticized those lines, spoken by that woman on a borrowed boat who is looking for a man she never finds. And in the meantime, another man falls in love with her and accompanies her in her futile search, knowing that at each step she might find this sailor whom she travels the world in search of, the specter of a man she met once and immediately loved.

I became my own version of the woman on the boat.

Lately I feel I’m leaving parts of myself in all these different countries. Glittering shards of my stunned heart.

I have so much freedom, and what do I do with it?

I am shattering my own heart, again and again, and writing poems about it, and pretending it is a beautiful life.

* * *

I do believe there is always another love, for everyone. But god damn it, the search to find that love is brutal: brutal to connect, to break apart, to then pretend that person isn’t still inside me, like the pieces of sea urchin spine still lodged in the skin of my heel after I kicked them while swimming three weeks ago on Korčula. Dennis tried to remove them with iodine, with a sewing needle, with tweezers.

They remain in me.

You remain in me.

While I move, scuffed and squeaking but still not weighted down with responsibilities or a reason to be in any one place, to the next baggage carousel.

* * *

My advice, if you’re thinking of being a “digital nomad,” a “location independent” individual? Or a person who is able to travel to date? Maybe don’t do it for too long. It’s seductive and addictive. Too easy. There is always a way out, a reason to leave, and that reason is your life: Your life is elsewhere.

Gosh, it was fun for a while. I’m still trying to revise the book I’m writing, The Itinerary Is Desire, about my mid-thirties years (2016-2020) where I was totally committed to being (sorry) a “digital nomad,” the years I didn’t have an apartment, just bounced from Airbnb to petsitting to friends’ houses.

But that kind of lifestyle can’t go on forever. I was telling my friends the other day I feel like a video game character who’s stuck in place, moving limbs but not going anywhere — which is ironic, because I’m going a lot of places. But I think you know what I mean.

* * *

I am trying to love my life, to think positive thoughts, to take Mary Oliver’s advice, to be grateful for what I have a lot of: freedom, pleasure, peace. I waste my freedom doing everything except writing, which is what I love to do, a passion that feels both comforting and frightening all at once.

Another way to look at it: I’m traveling around in search of something, meeting and connecting and caring about a few (lucky!) men, riding along on Vespas and boats and trying my best to be a pleasant companion, a momentary source of shared joy.

I feel lost lately. But I have to take responsibility: I dislodged myself from comfort, safety, home, the status quo.

For now, no more traveling in search of someone, I say to Duras, to myself, to that mysterious woman on the borrowed boat who can’t see what is right in front of her own nose. No more looking, for god’s sake, Sanders.

Only the poet-friends, only true friendship, only my own writing, only other people’s art, only books, only standing in one place, only receiving from the universe. I’m surrendering control.

I’m trying: letting go.
I’m trying: accepting that I made choices to bring my life to where it is today.
I’m saying: Thank you for the beauty and complexity of who you are. I am still restless, but learning to stand (more consistently) in one place. When I say “place” I mean myself.

What, or who, wants me knows where to find me.