The Wanderer

One Saturday afternoon sometime deep into October of last year, I went for a walk. I didn’t have a destination in mind but the vivid scenery of downtown Chicago was a good backdrop for my random melancholy. This was one of the few occasions where I had absolutely nothing planned. I had finished work, my roommate was out of town, my friends were all caught up in their elaborate romances or running errands after a long week. I found myself with a spare few hours on a beautiful Chicago fall afternoon. The view from my bedroom left much to the imagination, a simple parking lot with a backdrop of a beautiful orange and pink sunset looming in the not so distant future. I was faced with a quandary, either I change into my pajamas and watch how I met your mother for the 20th time, or I venture out and find solace in the beauty of the city I call home. Thankfully, I chose the latter. I quickly changed into something slightly more presentable and began my journey down Michigan avenue, taking in the scenery around me with every step. Eventually I found myself in the Art Institute of Chicago, walking through the many galleries in the building, peering into the souls of the great artists that called this place home.

As I walk through the museum I ponder on the meaning of it all; why did all of these people decide to make art, to portray the world in this way, with these mediums. I thought of my own work, at that point raw and undefined, of how helpful it was to jot down my thoughts on paper, of how important it was to express my emotions in a physical form. I wander into the room with Monet’s collection of hay stack paintings. Monet, a masterclass of color and form, spent over a year painting the same two stacks of hay in his back yard, playing with angles and color, finding ways to display the majesty of the world we live in with something as simple as a stack of hay. Those paintings, as seemingly repetitive as they are, are some of my favorite paintings, not because of my undying love of haystacks, but because for me they represent why we make art in the first place. Every moment of our lives is a painting. The steamy coffee mug on my desk table, Frank Ocean singing me to sleep, the blue birds building a nest in the tree next to my window, and a million other small moments. Monet found so much beauty in these two simple haystacks that he painted them 30 times, each one as magnificent as the last. We spend so much of our time jumping from experience to experience, finding that dopamine spike in the newest trend or video, and sometimes you find beauty in something as simple as a haystack on a summer day.

This blog, this new experience I’m writing is called The Wanderer. I’ve been wandering my whole life, from home to home, from experience to experience. I’ve traveled the world, I’ve loved and I’ve lost, I’ve had my fare share of good moments and bad moments, and I’m here to share it. I find that the best moments are ones that you wander into. With no real direction or goal, we stumble onto experiences that fundamentally change us. A lot of that belief is reflected in my writing, I write stories about love, and no one ever expects to find love, we always wander into it. One day you’re staring at a haystack that’s been in your backyard for 20 years, and the next you’re inspired. One day you walk into a coffee shop you’ve passed by a hundred times and lock eyes with the girl in the corner humming the song that’s been stuck in your head all week. One day you decide to talk a walk around town, you take a different route to your favorite museum, and you see the world in a whole new light. This is that story.