CHAPTER ONE: Because I was bored

My name is of no significance. However, for the sake of this story, I suppose I'd better tell you. It's Brigid. Now, as far as names go, it could have been a lot worse. And it's fairly uncommon too. I share it with a Celtic goddess, a saint and my aunt, so I'm pretty much okay with it.

This book will contain the warped babble that spews forth from my brain. And, hopefully, it will stop me from saying my nonsense out loud, but I'm afraid I'm not that optimistic. I tend to move through life in a constant state of confusion. I confuse myself. I confuse everyone. I even have arguments in my own head.

I'm just going to do the boring thing and give you some background to all this. I am eighteen. I have a kitten, wonderful parents, and two older brothers who I simultaneously adore and blame for everything in my life. At the moment I am on a gap year. I tell everyone the year off is for me to 'figure out where I want to go with my life', but in reality I think it's just my being too lazy to go straight to university. Then again, even that point I'm not too sure on, because I do actually have to figure out what I'm going to spend the rest of my miserable life doing. So maybe I'm not lazy?

Anyway, most of my friends are back in Cape Town beginning the courses that will lead to jobs and stable lives and then marriages, mortgages, children, pensions and DEATH. Maybe I'm delaying the inevitable by running away? Or maybe I just have a depressing outlook on the lives of the responsible?

I started 'planning' my gap year when I was in grade ten. But that just consisted of bold talk and squiggles drawn over maps of the world. 'Yeah, so I'm going there and there and, ooooh, yeah, I HAVE to go there.' It's still just bold talk and squiggles, but, oh jesus, I'm actually in the middle of a squiggle!

See, thanks to all my shit talking to pretty much everyone, I somehow got myself trapped into this 'massive trip where I'm going to see EVERYTHING'. I told too many people. I'm too stubborn. I'm experiencing too much fun and terror to chicken out now.

The plan, devised while meant to be studying for my final geography exam, has unfortunately been pretty successful. Joe, the eldest of my two big brothers, has been working as a vet in the UK for a while. So, abandoning my kitten, parents, one brother and all my friends, I left South Africa and moved to the grey northern part of the world, supposedly to earn money for when I begin travelling the rest of Europe.

I've been working at Domino's Pizza ever since.... The End.

written by

Brigid Jelsma on February 21, 2011 from Hertford, United Kingdom

from the travel blog: Walk a little further to another plan

tagged Book and Hertford

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