The Ha Giang Loop, part II
Thoughts on what freedom feels like
Some things can only be felt, not described. On Vietnamese mountain roads, bartending at 4am, and discovering that freedom isn't a nebulous concept—it's a bodily sensation.
[you can find part I of this post here]
I think I experienced one of the peaks of my life.
I have been so deliriously happy. There's something about being on the back of a motorbike. A cliff side with a staggering drop on your right. The scenery flying by, undulating limestone crags, foliage so green it seems to be lit from within. The sun casts spells on the landscape around, turning everything to gold. The rushing air becomes wind in the cave of your mouth.
To be on a motorbike is to be at your most powerful and your most vulnerable. It is to be alert, to be fully aware, awake. To ride is to put your life into your own hands; riding pillion means putting your life into someone else's.
This is what freedom is. To choose to take your own risks. To live an inch from death, because that is where the most beautiful views are. And to feel high, so high, as you pull in to home in the evenings, dusty, sweaty, alive.
Because you are so close to the edge, I think it also forces you to be very honest with yourself. I cried twice on the back of the bike, in awe of both how central I am within my own story, and how unimportant I am in the grand scheme of things. Every person is a world, every person is a speck of dust, and it's through love that we matter. The mountains don't care if they swallow us whole, but my mother would.
I felt my own mortality multiple times on this trip. Especially when Nurik told me to go step out on a ledge, and I realised that there was nothing beneath me except thousands of feet of air.
I carry the mountains within me, now.
The forests and the green and the rushing air. Surely, having held all of this in my eyes has altered me, has had some effect. How can you look at something so beautiful it brings tears to your eyes and leave unchanged?
If I had to try and put words around it, I think I’ve now felt freedom. Not as some arbitrary concept, but as a sensation I’ve experienced in my body. It’s a similar feeling to diving off a starting block, body suspended for a moment in air. Or being on a nippy little boat, the sea spraying your face, breeze cool and salty in your nostrils, wind making a mess of your hair. Or going for a walk through a city with no particular destination, getting to notice all the worlds jostling against each other on the sidewalk.
Now that I know the sensation, can recognise it more easily, it’s all I want. I never want to feel trapped again. Everyone I’ve met who knows me well has told me I was never suited to be in an office. I never really understood them - a job is a job - but I can see, now, the invisible cuffs of working in an office. Shuttling between office and home, working in a coffee shop for a change, staring at a screen for the majority of the day. Worrying about your facial expressions on Zoom, writing up a time sheet, feeling anxious as the messages and e-mails pile up.
No job is ever really freeing. I probably (definitely) over-romanticised bar work in my last post. It sure as hell isn’t fair. I have so much to learn, the pace is breathtaking, the hours long and difficult. I sat down once in twelve hours, the shift dragging on later than scheduled. But walking out of the club at near 4am, half delirious, I saw the full moon hanging in the dwindling night. I biked on near empty streets to a station and caught a train home. The sky was waking up. A young couple slept in the carriage, the woman’s hair tumbling over the man’s shoulder, his head resting on hers.
I got home, tiptoeing past my nanijan’s room, and sprawled across the bed. It was almost five in the morning, but I wrote my three pages. I took this job to be able to write more. My body is tired. I’m on all lates this week. But I know that freedom is also a practice. An attitude. A state of mind.
I was complaining to a dear friend of mine yesterday. I told him I hated being new to things, mediocre at them. Knowing that I have the particular disease of perfectionism, he laughed at me and said I’d never been mediocre at anything in my life. And then he reminded me that I am in control of my thoughts.
He’s right. I am in control of my own thoughts—and my own narrative, my own freedom. There’s more to say about the sociopolitical positioning of freedom, but I also have agency to write my own story, perceive my life the way I wish to.
So here’s how I see it: I am tired, but I’m also grateful to have a job three weeks after touching down in London. I’m grateful to be a fingernail away from 30, and feel so sure that I am on the right path. I have no idea where I’m headed, but I can feel that it’s the right direction, even if it looks questionable to anyone else. I’m glad that I stopped to consider what I was doing. That I am not sleepwalking through my life. If I make mistakes now, at least I can call them my own. I know, now, that my life, my choices, are all mine.
