The Yellow Envelope Read online

  In college, I’d majored in English and dreamed of writing. My entire life I’d been a writer. In some of my earliest memories I am lying in the grass, five years old, writing poems about the sunset. But now, even my bedside journals lay unfilled. For years I’d had an intense desire to see the world, but here I was, stuck in a job that afforded me only two weeks of vacation. I was twenty-eight years old, and in the seven years since I’d graduated from college, I’d let go of everything I’d always dreamed of doing. I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t traveling. I wasn’t happy.

  I wasn’t happy. Somewhere along the line, I’d traded in the person I wanted to be, the person who I really was inside, for the traditional model of success. Deep in my bones, I knew that there was more to life, but I was desperately fearful of finding out what.

  That morning, once again, the uncomfortable reality of my unhappiness scrolled past the screen of my mind. The harder my anxiety squeezed, the faster I ran. Darting among the ancient pines, I jumped tree roots and loose rocks.

  The truth kept rising to the surface: You don’t want what you have. And then, quickly, my brain would form a rebuttal and come back swinging: You have everything. Why aren’t you happy? My arms pumped like wings as I ran. The truth: You can’t continue on like this. The rebuttal: It’s too late to want something else.

  Anxiety squeezed at my throat, building and building until I couldn’t breathe. Unable to keep running, I stood in the middle of the muddy trail, gasping, the silence of the forest all around me. My hands found my knees, and I doubled over, trying to take a breath. It was suddenly clear that I had two choices. I could either say the truth out loud and admit my desire for a different kind of life, or I could keep the truth inside of me forever.

  If I said the truth out loud, I knew there would be no unsaying it, no unknowing it. I’d have to accept the consequences. I had a whole life! It was pretty inconvenient not to want any of it anymore. But I also knew that if I kept the truth inside, I would have to tuck it into the soft belly of my soul and starve it of oxygen, and, as it withered and died, a part of me would too.

  It was impossible to go on like this, barely breathing in the Purgatory between knowing and not knowing, between telling the truth or denying it. I had to make a choice.

  And then I did the bravest thing that I have ever done. I let the truth slide into the center of me and take over. My heart pounded like a war drum.

  My eyes surveyed the landscape of my body. Over the past year I’d molded it into the thin and strong form of a runner. The black spandex of my pants sat tight over the outline of muscles in my legs. Beneath my shirt my taut stomach rose and fell with my breath. As a marathoner, I was often asked, “What are you running from?” The question always annoyed me. But wasn’t it true? I was running from something.

  My legs straightened, and I looked around me. The trees stood solid and patient. Quietly, into the empty forest, I whispered: “Kim, you do not want this kind of life.”

  It was shocking to hear my own voice out loud in the silence of the trees. Little puffs of breath clouded against the cold air when I spoke. I said it again, slightly louder. “Kim, you don’t want this kind of life. You’re not happy.” And then, because it felt safe to say it out there, “You want to write. You want to see the world.”

  It existed now, out in the open. And as I stood there in the silence of the morning, my anxiety receded like it had been grabbed by the tide and sucked out to sea.

  • • •

  That day I did not go home, sit my husband down, and tell him what I needed to do. No, that day I simply finished my run and continued on with my morning. My revelation remained a secret. But inside of me a door cracked opened and the truth stuck its head into the world. I could not go on pretending that it did not know the fresh air of possibility.

  Speaking the truth out loud during my morning run brought me some peace, because now I knew what I had to do. And the truth bought me time, a few anxiety-free months, to gain the courage to actually do it.

  A plan began to form in my mind. Because I wanted to travel the world—and not just for a week or a month at a time, but for as long as I possibly could—I’d have to quit my job. The burden of debt was intimidating, so even though I loved our house, we’d have to sell it. The same went for the car.

  But the biggest hurdle of all was that I’d have to persuade Brian, who would be receiving this news out of the blue, to give up his own life—to step away from a job that he liked and in which he had been recently promoted, to follow me to the ends of the earth to chase something I couldn’t even properly explain.

  Three months after my run in the park, Brian and I went for a hike. The Pacific Northwest reveled in a burst of sun and warm temperatures, the first we’d seen in many weeks. The winter had been long and dark. We’d been slogging through the days for months, just waiting for the rains to stop.

  But on that February day, the sun shone and the sky beamed a birds-egg blue. We packed a backpack and drove to Oregon’s Opal Creek Wilderness area to go hiking.

  It was a Sunday, and as we climbed the empty trail, the smell of tree bark and moisture thick in the air and the moss green and plump with months of rainfall, we talked our normal Sunday talk about the dread of Monday.

  We walked past turquoise pools at the headwaters of Battle Ax and Opal Creek, climbing in elevation among the earthy pines. At an overlook we stopped to catch our breath. I sat down on a rock and dug through the backpack for my water bottle, then looked up at Brian. My heart pounded, not from exertion, but from the truth I so badly needed to speak. I took a deep breath, then said, “I just keep wondering why we’re doing this if we aren’t happy. We don’t have to, you know. We could quit our jobs tomorrow.”

  Brian looked at me, surprised. “Who says we’re not happy?”

  I drew the water bottle to my lips and took a long swig. “What I mean is that there are other ways to live. Sometimes when I’m sitting in my cube, I look thirty years down the road and see a bigger house, a nicer car, a management position, and one of those terrible clocks people set that count down the days to retirement. It’s depressing.” I did not tell him about my run or the truth I already knew. “I guess I keep wondering what the point is. Don’t you ever want something more?”

  Brian looked skeptical. “Sure, sometimes I want something different. But I don’t think that things are as bad as you’re making them out to be.”

  I shrugged. “I know they’re not bad, but they’re not great either. Are they? Is that all we want, a not bad life?”

  Brian leaned back on his heels and knocked the mud from his boot. “Listen, I know we aren’t tripping over ourselves to get to work every morning, but we have more than a not bad life, Kim. We have a good life.”

  The rich, brown dirt at my feet smelled of earth and rain, and I swirled my finger through it. He was right; we did have a good life. And that was what made my desire so hard to accept. It was one thing to give up a bad life, or even a not bad life, but who in their right mind wanted to throw away a good life?

  “All right,” Brian continued, “say we do quit our jobs tomorrow. Then what? We move under the Fremont Bridge?”

  “We could travel. I could take a shot at writing. You know I’ve always wanted to write.” I paused, unsure of how to continue. “You could take time off to figure out what you really want to do. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, actually.”

  Brian looked out over the treetops toward the eastern sky. He enjoyed his job, I knew, but it didn’t fulfill him. “In a perfect world that sounds nice. In the real world that sounds implausible.”

  “People do it, Brian. I’ve read blogs and researched it. We could sell everything and just explore for a little while.”

  He shook his head. “Do you know how much that would cost? And what about our house? What about health insurance? Retirement? There are too many factors.”

 
; I knew about those things and had considered them all. I didn’t know what we would do about our house, about health insurance, about the complicated details of deconstructing our life. I didn’t know anything except for that I wanted to go.

  Brian screwed the lid on to his water bottle and stuffed it in the backpack. “Ready?”

  When I stood to follow him I said, “Just hypothetically, where would you go if you could go anywhere?”

  He turned to look at me and rolled his eyes.

  “Come on,” I said. “Indulge me!”

  “All right, anywhere?” He walked in silence for a moment. “I’d go to Nepal and hike the Himalayas and to France to walk the Alps. I’d spend all of my time in the mountains.” This did not surprise me; we were both happiest in the mountains. Brian turned to look at me. “What about you?”

  “Iceland. Thailand. I want to ride the train from Russia, through Mongolia, to China.”

  Brian only nodded.

  “Do me a favor and just think about it, okay? I’m serious.”

  He turned to look at me. “All right, I’ll think about it.”

  And I left it at that, for awhile.

  But telling Brian about my idea had only strengthened my resolve. The more I spoke of it, the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that what I’d experienced during my run in Forest Park was real and that my desire for more could not be ignored. I’d presented it to Brian as a question: What if? But I already knew what I needed to do.

  Soon I was bringing up the sell-it-all-quit-our-jobs-and-travel topic regularly. And each time I did, Brian shot it down. To be fair, he did not object to the idea of traveling. He liked the idea of a road trip around the United States and Canada, or hiking the Appalachian Trail. But he wasn’t sold on the big, bold plan I’d drawn up in my head. Quitting our lives to take an open-ended trip around the world was, in his very rational mind, the equivalent of playing hopscotch for a living. Of course, I knew there were plenty of good reasons to stay. But I’d spent my entire life staying. I wanted to be the kind of woman bold enough to go.

  One night, after a marathon nag-fest, Brian collapsed on the couch. He set his beer on the table and rubbed his hands over his face. He looked worn down, and I felt a flicker of pride in that. I would outlast him. “How do I know that this isn’t just one of the big, ambitious ideas that you get crazy passionate about and then dump three weeks later when the luster wears off?”

  “I don’t do that.”

  “What about vegan baking? You went out and spent one hundred dollars on supplies, and then you got bored of it in two weeks.”

  “That’s not fair. That’s one thing.” It was true that I’d adopted my fair share of passion projects over the years. Rather than owning up to what I truly longed to do and the fear I felt that I might fail at it, I’d filled the empty space inside of me with safe alternatives that I burned through like matches. I didn’t care about failing at vegan baking because I didn’t care about vegan baking. So I threw myself into it to distract me from my true desires. How could I convince Brian that this time I was serious? This time it was real? My game plan had been to hope that, eventually, he’d just see that this was different. But looking at it from his perspective I understood how the plan I presented just seemed like another one of my meanderings.

  “Roller Derby? Triathlons? Yoga? The thing is Kim, when you first brought up this trip I thought it was in the, Oh, if I had a million dollars kind of way. Now you say you’re serious, that you have to do it. How do I know? And where does that leave me?”

  It was the question I’d been dreading, because I didn’t know where it left him. Would I be willing to do it all without him? Brian was content with the life we had.

  I was the one who had come unmoored.

  • • •

  Three months later, something surprising happened: Brian said he’d go.

  Through a series of negotiations, a plan began to take shape. At first, Brian agreed to travel for six months if we requested leaves of absence from our jobs. I wanted my freedom, but I feared it too, and Brian’s plan felt safe, so I agreed to a six-month sabbatical. But when we sat down to sketch out all of the places we wanted to go we realized that six months wasn’t nearly enough time to see the world. Even Brian agreed that if we were going to do it, we might as well do it right. So we decided to go for a year, quit our jobs, and rent the house out.

  Ultimately, though, that idea also left us dissatisfied. We’d have a mortgage but no paycheck, and we weren’t sure if the going rate for rent would cover our mortgage payments. Plus, what if the roof leaked or the water heater died? There were so many unpredictable variables, and they scared us. Eventually we worked our way around to the plan I’d come up with in the first place. We’d sell it all and travel indefinitely. I’d take a shot at writing. We’d both use the time to figure out what we really wanted out of life.

  When I asked Brian what had changed, he told me a story from his past. Brian is fascinated and amazed by the natural world and knew that he wanted to spend his life outdoors as a naturalist. So when it came time to choose a career, he packed up and left for an out-of-state college where he could study to become a park ranger. But after only one year he quit the program and transferred to the school where I’d met him. I’d heard that version of the story a dozen times and didn’t know there was more to it.

  “Here’s the truth,” Brian confessed one night over dinner. “It was the first time I’d left my comfort zone, and it terrified me so much that I transferred colleges to live near my best friend. The story I told myself was that I’d never be able to make a living as a naturalist, but actually I was just too scared. My dream slipped through my fingers because I couldn’t overcome my own fear. I’m not going to let the same thing stop your dream too.”

  I’d cried because I knew what he said was true, and I was touched by his willingness to be brave. But I also felt sadness for him and happiness for me and guilt for my steadfast refusal to give up what I wanted.

  With Brian on board, I renamed our savings account the “World Travel Fund.” We paid off our debts bill by bill. Our cable and gym memberships and magazine subscriptions were all canceled. We sold the car we owed money on and kept the seventeen-year-old clunker I’d had since college. I squirreled away every extra dime we had in a change jar. Every three months I’d count it, wrap it up in coin paper, and deposit it into our World Travel Fund.

  In July 2011, almost two years after I first spoke my truth out loud, we put our house up for sale. The country was in the middle of the housing bubble collapse, and the real estate market was in shambles. A house just down the street, very similar to ours, had been sitting on the market for months, and we expected ours to do the same. We were shocked when it sold in one day, furnished, and the buyer wanted to move in by the end of the following month.

  We had to scramble to find a temporary rental and scramble some more to sell the rest of our nonessential possessions. We held a garage sale one weekend under the yellow August sun, and by Sunday afternoon, 98 percent of every material thing we owned in this world was no longer ours. It felt both liberating and heartbreaking to watch it all go. I had to imagine each thing we owned as a solitary weight that, collectively, kept me tied to the ground when I wanted to fly. Thinking like that helped me, but I knew getting rid of our stuff was harder on Brian because his heart was not in this journey in the same way mine was.

  Turning the house over was a different story; it nearly ripped both of our hearts out. Brian and I had moved into our house as renters a year after relocating to Portland. We loved it, our neighbors, and the neighborhood, so when the chance came to buy it, we jumped. Then we spent the next three years replacing floors, knocking down walls, painting, and landscaping. Every piece of our tiny house had been restored with love. It was ours. And I always felt myself opening up a little at the sight of the front door.

&nbs
p; Our house held so many good memories of holidays and cookouts and evenings with friends. Brian proposed to me in the living room. At the end of bad days that house had been a refuge for us. It was the first place that had ever truly felt like home to me.

  On the day that we handed the keys over to the new owners, I walked through the empty rooms and wailed like a baby, running my hands along the walls and replaying favorite memories in my head. I thought of our first Christmas there together, alone in our still-new city, the tree bright and twinkling in front of the picture window. As I moved from room to room, I remembered dinner parties and movie nights and the way I loved to sit by the window in the family room and watch the first rains of the season pour from the sky.

  My mind recalled the dreams we had for our lives when we bought the house, of the babies that we imagined might one day crawl on the floor and all of the other things that would never come to pass, not there anyway, because we were choosing a different direction. Letting go of all that the house represented was extremely hard, but it was what I wanted and what Brian had ultimately agreed to.

  When I voiced that truth in the forest I wasn’t sure if Brian or I had the courage to turn our lives upside down and shake them until all of the loose pieces fell away. But against the odds we’d done it. We no longer owned a house or had nine-to-five jobs. What we had instead were three boxes of personal artifacts stored in my best friend Wendy’s basement and a few more that we’d shortly store in Brian’s parent’s basement in Ohio. And we had freedom. And time.

  We also had two 65-liter backpacks and two one-way tickets to Ecuador, our first stop, selected solely because the fares were the cheapest we could find. We wanted to go everywhere, we reasoned, so it didn’t much matter where we started.

  Even with our departure date looming I still didn’t really know exactly why traveling was the thing that I needed to do more than any other. I only knew that the truth welled up from deep inside of me that day in Forest Park. It was a truth that the most essential part of me had always known. I needed to see the world. I needed to write. I didn’t have to know why. Wanting it was enough.