WALKING AFTER DARK
The thing is, I used to love to walk. When I lived in Toronto that was all I did. It helped me clear my mind and it gave me a sense of the city, like I was a part of its fabric.
“I don’t know what it is but there’s something about this town that feels…sleepy.”
I like traveling but it’s the walking that’s killing me. Allow me to indulge in my first-world problems (it is my Substack after all). Walking got a little more tricky for me just over two years ago when I went to Oslo for my partner’s conference. Norway was experiencing an unusual heat wave for late June and the hilliness of Oslo was making my feet swell. The toes chafing and rubbing against the inner soles of my shoes left me with bulbous blisters on both my pinky toes (which, TMI, eventually popped). It was horrible and my toes never really recovered, instead forming rough patches that dashed any hope of an Only Fans foot fetish account should I ever need an extra source of income (I kid, obviously).
The irony is that my career as a dancer never really fucked up the look of my feet so much. Male dancers are generally spared that problem (among many others) since we don’t wear pointe shoes and stand on our toes like the women do (patriarchy). I still remember clearly when I got my first bunion. It was after I decided to quit ballet. I bought a pair of Aussie boots that I needed to wear in, resulting in a huge bunion on my right big toe. That bunion represented my failure to understand that quitting ballet wouldn’t be the end of physical pain as I had hoped. Sure, I didn’t get sore as much from ballet (and I wasn't wracked with the same mental trauma), but life has a way of reminding you that, ultimately, staying alive is a fight against gravity which is always a losing battle.
The bubble of living in Amsterdam means that my feet are not accustom to walking as much as I they used to. Amsterdam truly is a biking city, and so long as my legs can work, it is the quickest way to get anywhere. As someone who has somehow managed to avoid getting his driver’s license (I’m basically an adult-child a this point), Amsterdam has become the city that works best for me.
The issue is, the world is not Amsterdam, and when I travel, I’m reminded what a joke it is to even think about Amsterdam as an actual city. Even in a small town like Bergamo (which is where I find myself presently), there’s a pulse of a city (albeit feint) that hits different from where I live. Cars are rampant and walking is inevitable, often uphill to the old part of town. Traveling anywhere has become my opportunity to get my steps in.
A day in Rome and it was almost 30,000 steps. Our beautiful friend who has lived and worked in Rome for the past ten years, gave us the Roman treatment, breezing past all the important monuments so that we could spend time eating at beautiful restaurants and dancing the night away at a converted squat-turned-cultural-centre for an all night Cumbia party.
The buzz and chaos of a regular Sunday night at Rome central train station was enough to bring me and my husband nearly to tears as we made the over three hour trek back to Bergamo where we are staying. The thing about a sleepy town like Bergamo is that by 9pm on a Sunday, there are no buses running near our Air BnB and there are no taxis at the bus station. Desperate, my partner turned to me and said, “the walk is 50 minutes.”
The thing is, I used to love to walk. When I lived in Toronto that was all I did. It helped me clear my mind and it gave me a sense of the city, like I was a part of its fabric. On the weekends I would spend hours walking everywhere: up and down Church Street, going into This Ain’t The Rosedale library and walking slowing passed Woody’s to sneak a glimpse at the gay porn they showed on their screens above the bar; I’d walk through Ryerson Campus and pretend I was going to college; then I’d walk into HMV to browse the new releases and plop on some headphones to listen to the new Bjork album; listen to the din of footsteps and endless conversations through the Eaton Centre; leaving through the Queen street exit I’d decide whether to go by Queen West and look through the Much Music Windows before heading into another bookstore or walk to the Beaches (the Beaches!) and stare out onto the water (which barely anyone would go into because apparently it was so polluted that some people experimented with developing camera film in there and it worked).
Maybe it was because I was young, but walking doesn’t have the same allure as it once did. Now when I walk, my ankles feel weak, my disastrous pinkies scream at me and my bunion throbs. But the night walk from Bergamo train station to our Air BnB reminded me that, through gritted teeth, I still got the legs so I might as well use them. Once I hit that stride and fixated on my gait, there was a moment where the muscle memory kicked in and I thought, “I am still a bad-ass walker.”
But honestly, why do we travel? We force ourselves into uncomfortable situations so we can get out of our comfort zones, learn something new about ourselves. We take all the beautiful pictures that we post on our socials, but we delete the real stuff from our online personas. We don’t talk about the time we lost our passport, or how our car got broken into and someone stole a bag, the moments that brought us to tears, how instead of climbing over a chain fence your foot got snagged and you face-planted in front of the University library (me) or when you specifically told the restaurant that you’re allergic to nuts but they failed to mention that their bread that they offered the table had bits of walnut in its crust (also me). We jam ourselves into public buses and planes, wait in line to board a boat, stand in the sun to get closer to the Trevi fountain, walk and walk and walk (and walk) until our legs are throbbing – and for what? To escape our daily lives for a moment? If this is the point, then sometimes I think it’s just as good to go to a rave. Think about it: you’re on your feet for hours, standing in line for the bathroom or the bar, being jostled around by sweaty bodies and by the end of the night (if you’re lucky) you feel absolutely wrecked and exhilarated. It’s a lot cheaper than traveling and at least at the end of the night you get to sleep in your own bed.