Bold Adventuress: Moveable Feasts from the Tarmac

I didn’t know it yet, but when Molly and I lamented our adolescence on her parents’ living room carpet in 2022 we were actually at our inaugural Moveable Feast. 

I had run away to the Washington mountains again as I was wont to do when things went bad. College was in the rearview mirror and had taken with it the first man I’d ever loved. As soon as my cap hit the air he was aboard a plane across the Atlantic, never to return. I was floundering, putting on weight with condensation-riddled pints in sticky bars. I’d peel off my bodysuit to lay in bed until the sun rose, eyes fixed on the popcorn ceiling of my childhood bedroom in an attempt to rid the spins. I freelanced at a myriad of companies to give the illusion of success to my parents’ friends. My monthly loans were a taunting reminder that I’d squandered “the days.” 

And they were probably over, at least the best of them. Except I still had acne and a victim complex. Go figure. 

Molly and I became cosmic siblings after we collided at seventeen, raised in mirrored east and west Americana-infused coastal towns. The first night in our freshman dorm we tossed a plastic container of trail mix back and forth between twin-sized beds. Teeth coated in chocolate caramel, we debated the concept of an afterlife. The conclusion was that there wasn’t one. When she took me to her hometown on spring break, white peaks dwarfed every moment. I wept on the airplane as it circled Mt. Rainier. The stars, the ones she’d longed for in the Boston skyline, were brighter than any I’d ever seen. 

But that December in Seattle we were four years older and a fraction as confident, back where we’d started: the same beds, the same dinner times, the life jacket too tight. We dreamt in foreign languages, hoping we’d reach the men we loved in an in-between world. We ate new foods and shimmied into smaller clothes to impress them and each other. We’d celebrated my birthday that year in a café in Paris, singing joyeaux anniversaire with the candles flickering. Somehow, everything since had crumbled in a swirl of cigarette smoke. It often felt like I’d been handed the matches, the arsonist fleeing the scene of the crime in another direction. 

The Yellow Light was our attempt to hold onto each other. Digital connection was difficult with time differences and minimum wage obligations. We scanned full pages of our diaries in hopes that total transparency would yield community. That maybe being vulnerable with the world in the way we always were with each other would breed empowerment. 

We brought the feast on tour, making the six and a half hour pilgrimage in the clouds to opposite coasts. One of us always waiting with blinkers on in aggressive pick-up traffic. In between bad karaoke and lost cellphones we brainstormed new themes for Yellow Light (affectionately shortened to “the mag”) on my twenty-third birthday trip to New York. When my world was temporarily shattered at twenty-four, I booked a red eye to the mountains. Molly smiled at me softly over brunch as I stabbed my hashbrowns with a fork. I didn’t need to explain. She was there to hold vigil in the unspoken.

We’ve stomped through the streets of London in matching trench coats, navigated the train to the Brighton sea giggling like we’d run away from home, hiked through Howth until our ankles bruised, and introduced men to each other with ears perked in protection. When we celebrated Thanksgiving in Dublin last year, her boyfriend fell ill with a cold. She crawled into my bed for some hotel tea. We kept the kettle on and stayed up until four in the morning deep in breathless conversation, the way we had when our beds were two feet apart, whispering our deepest secrets into the dark like a prayer. She sent me off at daybreak to my Cliffs of Moher tour the way she did for my Intro to Writing course. Sometimes I see a flicker of her as she was when we met - eyes wide at the glow of the city, singing Carly Simon in my passenger seat. Even then, at maybe her most scared, I found her brave. She taught me the beauty in not staying stuck. Not staying still.

Much has happened in the years since we founded this literary feast. I didn’t quite realize that was what it had become, until I read Eve Babitz in 2023. Her work was a balm to my confusion, a reframe of the wrecklessness my early twenties had brought me and an introduction to the concept of the “bold adventuress.” Babitz was adamant that Los Angeles in the 60s and 70s was a moveable feast à la Ernest Hemingway. His idea was that creative saloons were transient. It had me transfixed, and proved true in retrospect - I’d found creative camaraderie in Fort Greene as easily as I had in Shoreditch. 

The moveable feast evolved into extravagant foreign birthday parties, my favorite tradition and the best way to reconvene with those I miss. Plus, I got a kick out of the penultimate feast being set in Paris, a place Molly and I both once thought of as a second home. A place we both now leave uncircled on our maps. Sometimes you need to see new sights, you know?

In two weeks, my cosmic sister will return. We’ll vacation on Cape Cod and the Islands, let the saltwater lap against our calves and the sun lick our weathered skin. I’ll show her where we buried my great-grandmother last summer on Nantucket. I’ll show her the lighthouse where my family began. 

I’ve noticed some crow’s feet in the mirror lately. I think I like them, new paths to prove I’ve been here. I’ve seen. I’ll see again.