Wonders

A year after my dad died, I stood on a beach in Vietnam at 5am, watching waves stirred up by an incoming typhoon, asking myself the question I'd been avoiding for years: what if this is all there is? I'd had itchy feet for a while. So I booked one trip — Vietnam and Cambodia, nothing more ambitious than that. Three days in, I met Eddie on a bus outside Hanoi. That one yes led to another, and another. Four months and twenty-four countries later, I came home someone else entirely. Six months after Hanoi, I was standing in front of the Taj Mahal wondering if love was actually supposed to feel this steady. Somewhere in between, I stood at all four of the Great Wonders — and found a version of myself in each one that grief and twenty years of putting everyone else first had quietly buried. This isn't the highlight reel. There's a smashed coffee table, an altitude-sick meltdown in Cusco, and a grief thread that never fully resolves — because grief doesn't work that way, no matter how far you fly from it. There's also monkeys stealing sunglasses, deep-fried guinea pig, and a Bridge of Sighs that has followed me across the world. And there's Eddie, who taught me the difference between "I'll figure it out" and "we will figure it out." You don't need your whole life sorted to start living it. You just need to say yes.