Hell is Empty, and all the Devils are Here. - William Shakespeare
Paris, 2013
by Metin Fejzula | Tumblr | Website
“Did you know, you can quit your job, you can leave university? You aren’t legally required to have a degree, it’s a social pressure and expectation, not the law, and no one is holding a gun to your head. You can sell your house, you can give up your apartment, you can even sell your vehicle, and your things that are mostly unnecessary. You can see the world on a minimum wage salary, despite the persisting myth, you do not need a high paying job. You can leave your friends (if they’re true friends they’ll forgive you, and you’ll still be friends) and make new ones on the road. You can leave your family. You can depart from your hometown, your country, your culture, and everything you know. You can sacrifice. You can give up your $5.00 a cup morning coffee, you can give up air conditioning, frequent consumption of new products. You can give up eating out at restaurants and prepare affordable meals at home, and eat the leftovers too, instead of throwing them away. You can give up cable TV, Internet even. This list is endless. You can sacrifice climbing up in the hierarchy of careers. You can buck tradition and others’ expectations of you. You can triumph over your fears, by conquering your mind. You can take risks. And most of all, you can travel. You just don’t want it enough. You want a degree or a well-paying job or to stay in your comfort zone more. This is fine, if it’s what your heart desires most, but please don’t envy me and tell me you can’t travel. You’re not in a famine, in a desert, in a third world country, with five malnourished children to feed. You probably live in a first world country. You have a roof over your head, and food on your plate. You probably own luxuries like a cellphone and a computer. You can afford the $3.00 a night guest houses of India, the $0.10 fresh baked breakfasts of Morocco, because if you can afford to live in a first world country, you can certainly afford to travel in third world countries, you can probably even afford to travel in a first world country. So please say to me, “I want to travel, but other things are more important to me and I’m putting them first”, not, “I’m dying to travel, but I can’t”, because I have yet to have someone say they can’t, who truly can’t. You can, however, only live once, and for me, the enrichment of the soul that comes from seeing the world is worth more than a degree that could bring me in a bigger paycheck, or material wealth, or pleasing society. Of course, you must choose for yourself, follow your heart’s truest desires, but know that you can travel, you’re only making excuses for why you can’t. And if it makes any difference, I have never met anyone who has quit their job, left school, given up their life at home, to see the world, and regretted it. None. Only people who have grown old and regretted never traveling, who have regretted focusing too much on money and superficial success, who have realized too late that there is so much more to living than this.” — Wunderkammer: Did You Know (via wendesgray)
“You turn eighteen, and nineteen, and twenty, and it doesn’t matter if you indulge in frosted cake and birthday candles or not, the clock strikes and it sounds like a childhood’s sad song preached by no one in particular through an empty cathedral and it happens anyway. The universe will grant you a cotton lipped wish in apology, so, go ahead, buy the candles. You’re eighteen and you drink for the first time since the one incident mid-spring that made school unbearable and ruined the entire summer before you turned seventeen, and you end up crouched in between two couches crying out soft, broken nonsense. You’re eighteen and you’re half in love with your Literature teacher and you never admit to it because the action of it is fucked up enough, right, and you are not something even half lovable anyway. You see California that summer and the disease you carry everywhere of homesickness does not relapse during the night. You decide you have probably been going to the wrong places your entire life. You get a tattoo just before you turn nineteen, and almost everyone is there with you, and the bee’s kiss buzz of the needle feels grounding, like summer’s song rising from the season long rattling of your bones and turning it into poetry across your right thigh. You turn nineteen and no one is in town but your mom buys you a cake anyway and it is just another day. You have a lot of firsts that year, your first cigarette and your first New York sight, and they feel the same somehow. You take a drag of New York mid autumn and it feels like nothing you’ve ever felt and it burns a little and you’re not entirely sure you like it, but it makes you feel other worldly and inhuman, so you smoke two, three, ten more cigarettes that year and you go back to New York for a second and third time, and you love it this time, East Coast geography turned to nicotine in your system. The third time you go you turn twenty mid trip and you forget the birthday candles but you swear to yourself that you will never forget the year you were nineteen. You keep recycling words and memories to make sure you don’t forget. It’s probably because you have only been twenty for three months and this, the business of being an adult is both miserable and joyful and also a simple fact. You look in the mirror and you are twenty. You know, with a confidence that sometimes shakes you, that you want to create, to turn California mountains and shiny, indecisive, alcoholic youth into things people can tuck in their journals like pressed flowers. You know you won’t be happy otherwise, that there is no alternative to your happiness but the words, no plan b. You think you know your body and the places across it that can make you sigh out static, rumbling galaxies named Love, and you know already, that you like the feeling of tall boys with large hands, and how it feels to make promises with your body when there is a boy next to it and music in between you. You know this, but you do not know, yet, the feeling you dreamed of when you were sixteen and seventeen, of jumping from something tall and daring edged into a deep, fountain youthed body of water, but you see a beautiful girl at a party that takes your breath away and you imagine it might feel like her eyes meeting yours. She does, and you feel like you’re fifteen. You realize, one weekend, sitting by the curb of a stranger’s house, too drunk, too mean, too fucked up, that you are in indigo blue deep over your head. That to this day you do not know how to speak to your parents without feeling misunderstood and that there are still things you are not brave enough to even admit to your twenty year old self. That being twenty feels a lot like being nineteen, but with more panic attacks during the night, and the drowning feeling in your lungs. The next time the world forces you deeper into adulthood you make sure to buy candles, close your eyes, and wish on young and bright and impossible things.” — Pale and Blue: (via goingoingone27)
