Written by AnneMarie Auvenshine (Based on Senthil’s Journey in ‘A Friend’ Novel)
Summer has a way of asking questions you didn’t know you were carrying. As the season winds down this year, I find myself doing what I do every August: counting backward. How many years has it been since I left Milwaukee for somewhere new? The answer keeps growing, and lately, so does my parents’ hesitation to plan the kind of trips we used to take. Age has a way of shrinking the map.
There’s one trip, though, that never really leaves me. I was still in school, and my family was headed to Florida — Disney World, the trip every kid is supposed to dream about. I pictured fireworks and a version of happiness I’d only seen in commercials. What I got instead was tension I hadn’t packed for.
The morning of our flight, my sister cried. Not out of excitement, but because she didn’t want to go at all — she asked why she’d even agreed to it in the first place. I remember standing there watching her unravel something I had been looking forward to for weeks. I understood her feelings even then, in the way you can understand something and still feel robbed by it. Out of all the trips we could have had together as a family, I’ve never quite forgiven that one for being the one that got tangled up in someone else’s reluctance.
And yet, a few feet away from that tension, my niece and nephew were living inside their own version of the trip entirely — laughing, running, collecting the kind of memories that don’t come with an asterisk. It’s strange how two people can stand in the same theme park and leave with completely different vacations.
That Florida trip was only our second real family vacation, the four of us together, if you don’t count the visits to cousins scattered across New York and Chicago. Somehow, decades later, I still remember the particular shape of that day — not the rides, not the fireworks, but the feeling of watching something I wanted slip slightly out of reach.
Overseas travel was even rarer. Outside of trips to India and one trip to London with my parents, the world stayed mostly a place I read about rather than stood in. My sister’s story went differently. Since getting married, she’s taken nearly a dozen trips a year, big and small, domestic and international — spring break, summer, whatever season offered an excuse. Her family rarely lets a school break pass without going somewhere.
I don’t say any of this with bitterness toward her life now. I say it because I’ve always loved the idea of traveling, and growing up, that idea never quite had the funding to become real. The 80s and 90s were a different economic world for families like mine. Trips weren’t a given; they were an event, planned around what was possible rather than what was wanted.
But here’s the part of the story I like better.
I may not have gotten to chase the world the way my sister did, but my book is doing something I never managed to do myself — it’s traveling without me. It’s already reached India, halfway around the globe, sitting on a shelf or in someone’s hands in a place I’ve only visited once, long ago. There’s something quietly astonishing about that: the words I wrote from a room in Waukesha are having a passport experience of their own.
So maybe I’ll never check off every destination on my list the conventional way. But I’ve started to wonder if there’s another way in — that maybe a book tour could someday put me on a plane to somewhere I’ve never been. Australia, specifically, sits at the top of that list, half dream and half dare. It sounds far-fetched to say out loud. But it isn’t impossible. It just requires the one thing I’ve been slowly learning to do since that morning my sister cried in the driveway all those years ago:
Believe the trip is still coming, even if it comes from a direction you never expected.