This Gives Me an Idea

ONCE YOU DISCOVER THE SALVATION OF TRAVEL, the way it allows you to escape the old, escape yourself, it’s a habit as tough to kick as any narcotic. But it wasn’t the thrill of the exotic that got me hooked. It was the shock of becoming exotic, too. Arrive from somewhere six hundred—or twenty-five hundred—miles away, without parents and school ties, as a stranger spouting certainties, and you are no longer bland suburban boy, heir of nothing. You awake suddenly imbued with unearned mystery, like that Czech exchange student who transferred into high school. Now you are different. You have done nothing but show up from far away, yet to the people you come upon it’s a distinction. You were like them once, restless and stuck. Not anymore. You moved. -- S.L. Price