Travagando Diaries
azusa pacific university study abroad — boston — pre-pandemic
the plan was dublin.
azusa pacific university. dual master’s program — international business and organizational science. study abroad. the whole cohort was meeting in boston to connect. i had one job: get there.
this was pre-pandemic — a time when people were still very much in the habit of gathering, socializing, saying yes to things. i was saying yes to all of it.
or i was trying to.
march 30. lax. departure gate.
the cabin door wouldn’t close.
and then the engine light wouldn’t turn off.
there is a very specific kind of dread that comes with sitting on a tarmac when you have a connection on the other side of the country and the rest of your cohort is already boarding in boston and the plane beneath you has decided today is the day it develops opinions about its own maintenance. the cabin door was open. no AC. i felt the ghost of sweat beginning its slow descent down my back.
i am a people pleaser to my core. i have always known this about myself. what i did not know — what this particular tarmac would teach me — is that my people-pleasing goes so deep that i felt personally responsible for the cabin door. as if i was the one who forgot to latch it. as if i was the pilot. the mechanic. the engineer who signed off on that engine light. all i could think about was how disappointed my group was going to be. how my absence would throw off the whole dynamic.
hindsight is 20/20. in that moment, what i understood was: the door is open and it is somehow my fault.
we finally took off. smooth once in motion — because of course it was.
boston. thirty minutes to my connection.
i’ve made worse work. people do it all the time. thirty minutes is nothing if you move.
we sat on the tarmac.
our gate was occupied.
by the time we got off the plane, i watched my connection to dublin push back from its gate and disappear. i could not have teleported fast enough if i had tried. i made my way to the delta service desk with my face practically melted off — the self-imposed pressure of excellence will do that to you. i was already composing the apology to my cohort in my head.
delta handed me a hotel voucher and a meal credit.
and something in me just released.
this is a sign. let go. stop trying to control what was never yours to control. things are going to work out as they should.
i removed the sulk from my face. i said to myself: this is not a problem. this is a detour. i have never been to boston. i love whiskey. at the very least, i am going to find a proper jameson in this city.
the next morning i woke up to a boston i hadn’t planned for and didn’t know i needed.
proper boston coffee. the kind of cold that doesn’t ask permission. and then — the mapparium.
if you don’t know it: it’s a 30-foot stained glass globe at the mary baker eddy library in the christian science plaza. you walk inside it. the world wraps around you, illuminated — continents rendered in color at the scale of something that was built as an act of reverence. it’s technically religious architecture. it doesn’t matter what you believe. you will feel something standing inside a world you can see all at once.
photos aren’t technically allowed. i may have been a sneaky girl about this. i am not confirming or denying.
fenway on foot. copley square. the washington statue in the public garden standing dramatic against a march sky that could not decide between winter and spring. one morning in boston is enough to know it has layers you’d need a week to understand. i was grateful for the morning.
then i caught my flight to dublin.
the trip that was supposed to start on march 30 started one day later, in better spirits, with a city i hadn’t planned to visit quietly installed somewhere inside me. the cohort was fine. ireland was waiting. and i showed up with a full night’s sleep, a good meal on delta’s tab, and the mapparium behind my eyes.
this is travagando. the missed connection that became a morning. the tarmac that became an afternoon in a city you’ve never seen. the hotel voucher that was actually a gift.
porque aquí se trabaja para poder vagar — and sometimes the delay is the destination.
dublin is worth the wait.