I arrived back home last night at 8:30pm, after spending a
five-day Christmas holiday at my mom’s new place in the country, a couple of
hours outside Ottawa. The homecoming included all my least favourite (though
not unusual) elements of an arrival home from a trip: my train was late, the
elevator down to the express bus stop was broken and my suitcase overstuffed,
the bus was packed, the sidewalks were icy, and I had rushed off on Saturday
too quickly, forgetting to do the dishes or put out the garbage. So I arrived
home alone to a dark, cold and smelly apartment.

I love traveling alone, and I’m very protective of my
independence. But the worst moment of a solo trip is always that arrival at the
train station or the airport arrivals hall – when it seems like every other
traveler is being greeted by someone who loves them. I usually stride past the
rows of smiling families trying my best to look busy and rushed. My expression,
I hope, suggests that there are people waiting for me in the parking lot, or
checking their watches at home. The reality is that I’ve lost count of the
number of flights, train journeys and bus rides I’ve taken in the past six
years, but the ones where someone’s been waiting for me at the end? That’s a
much easier number to keep track of.

There’s always an odd sense of deflation at the end of a
trip, however short and un-exotic it may be, and when you combine that natural
travel hangover with the inevitable post-Christmas blues, that’s a powerful
downer. I spent a sorry few minutes last night sitting on my desk chair (the
only one that wasn’t covered in papers), staring around my apartment at the
chaos of dishes, library books, notepads, post-its, clean and dirty laundry,
2006 tax forms – all the signs of someone who’s not home often enough to keep
track of her life. And I thought: Is this going to be my whole existence? Am I
going to spend the next twenty or thirty years coming home to dark, cold,
untidy, smelly apartments, where there is nothing in the fridge but margarine
and mustard and old, limp celery?

Then I realized that even if the answer was yes, it was
still worth it to be doing something I love. And I also realized that the
answer doesn’t have to be yes – I did the dishes, unpacked my bags, put out the
garbage, folded some laundry, made a cup of tea, read a little, and went to
bed. This morning I kicked that travel hangover the best way I know how – I was
up at 4:45, in a cab by 6, and by 7am I was on a train rolling east out of Ottawa, heading for Montreal
and on to New York City.