For better and for worse, this is your third trip in four months and it's the most you travelled in ages and your body is making it very clear that you're no longer suited for such things.

The first trip in February was fine, rejuevenating even probably because it was a trip entirely for you and you alone and that is a kindness you don't take forgranted. But it was a multi-segment trip that took along the West Coast and those flights add up.

You had March off, but April opened with a challenge. A tech conference. Blissfully only one day, although it was chased by a day in a sterile office with absolutely no vending machines and flavorless soda machines that maybe had caffiene additivies because apparently the Silicon Valley doesn't believe in soda. Those two days ate away at you. Thankfully, the next five were healing to the point that you wrote about it and wrote about it well even.

But today, on the last day of May at the precipice of June, you had one more set of travels to undertake. You went about your usual pre-travel checklist with a bit less enthuasium than usual. Perhaps part of it was the three trip in four (maybe five) months. Perhaps the larger part of it was the nature of the trip. Another tech conference and you, for all your optimism you try to keep in your body, find it hard to be excited about the tech sector in its current iteration.

Some of it is exstiential stuff. Some of it is incredibly minor. It's the Lyft app's scheduled ride functionality cycling between drivers and causing you to stress out about whether or not you'll get to the airport in a reasonable time. It's the plane “having a minor mechanical problem" and suddenly, it's two hours later and you have had to switch planes and gates and your schedule is askew. It's the announcement of only one power bank per passenger because apparently enough lithium-ion batteries caught fire in transit. It's your laptop being able to charge on USB-C but not registering that it is in fact charging.

Or maybe it has nothing to do with the tech conference and more to do with the circumstances. The fact that the rooftop bar is blaring music. The fact you are traveling alone. The fact that you are somehow in Eastern Time even though everything about this place screams Midwest. At least you've learned to chase tech conferences with artistic community.

You turn thirty-five next month. You think your next trip has to involve a train. You think your next trip has to be for you. You think how you travel because you have been given more flexibility to travel and are geographically central. You have one more plane trip planned in September. You hope (and perhaps this is too daring to put out in the world, but you're a little too fatigued to self-censor) that you won't travel alone for that trip. And maybe the trip after that. And maybe the trip after that.

The music from the rooftop bar is still unintelligible. There is a cavern of concrete and glass wrapping and distorting the sound. But to its credit, it did give you impetus for something different and maybe that is what will get you through is something different.