No Baggage: A Sudden Departure

Clara and Jeff: dumpster living in Texas.
No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love & Wandering

By Devinne Zadravec

How far would you travel for true love?

What began as a run-of-the-mill first date through the online dating website OkCupid, quickly turned into the trip of a lifetime when Clara first met Jeff on a fateful April day in Texas.

Her quiet, pensive nature was the perfect complement to his wild and passionate personality, and within a few short weeks of knowing each other they impulsively traveled to Europe with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and each other for company.

With a one-way ticket to Istanbul, passports, and nothing else in hand, Clara and Jeff embarked on a trip that would test their fledgling relationship, their personal comfort, and ultimately their faith in each other.

The adventure would change both their lives forever, healing old wounds and interwining their futures with laughter, mishaps, and discoveries across the globe. Clara’s debut book, No Baggage, is a true and inspiring story that demonstrates, quite literally, just what lengths we will travel for true love.

Excerpt from the book: Chapter One–Weightless

“So, do you actually know this guy you’re taking off with?”

Jaime looked at me through the rearview mirror. His eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses, but I could tell he was teasing. The “guy” I was taking off with was his old college roommate, Jeff, who was sitting right next to him in the front passenger seat of the Volvo station wagon. The three of us were winding through the cement maze of Houston morning traffic on the way to George Bush International Airport, where Jeff and I were scheduled for a flight.

“Jaime, no,” said Jeff. He said it with a half-smile-like reprimanding mother trying to hide her amusement over a childish misdeed.
“Just saying,” continued Jaime, “that as one of the few people who’s had the ‘pleasure’ of traveling abroad with you, I think she deserves to know what she’s getting into.” He took a handoff the steering wheel, grinned, elbowed Jeff, and then turned to my reflection in the rearview mirror, waiting for an answer. Do you actually know this guy?

I didn’t know how to answer the question. I evaded instead. “Is there anything I should know?”

“How many hours do you have?” joked Jaime. “I bet he ‘forgot’ to mention the time he ripped out the saline IV out of his arm and jail broke out of that hospital in Paris. It was the morning after Bastille Day. Jesus, he was running down the hallway in one of those little paper gowns. You know—the kind wher you can see the ass? Didn’t even stop to put on clothes, just barreled out the door and booked in right out of France.”

“Jaime, no!” yelled Jeff, with pretend horror. “That was twenty years ago. Our balls had barely dropped.”

“I don’t know, man,” said Jaime, shrugging his shoulders. “Let’s just say my rosary is going to get a workout the next three weeks.”

I sat in the backseat, running my fingers along the embroidered hem of my dress. Out toward the horizon, past the half-built subdivisions and empty cement lots, I could see a line of tiny planes lifting off into the smoggy morning sunrise. We were getting close. In a few hours my plane—our plane—would be taxiing onto the runway. It was a fair question: did I actually kow the man who would be sitting next to me as the wheels lifted off the tarmac?

Yes. And no.

I knew Jeff was a science professor and a sixth-generation Texan with a wild glint in his eye. I knew I’d thought, “Oh, you again,” when I met him for the first time, like I’d just bumped into an old friend. I knew our relationship had escalated into a flashing, tilt-a-whirl circus after a single round of tequila.

I knew he liked chocolate with flecks of sea salt. I knew that he’d been married for six years and separated for two, that he had a five-year old daughter with bright, brown eyes, and that he chased the unconventional life like a migratory bird flying north for winter instead of south. I knew he was a sparkling provocateur, but Tupac’s “Dear Mama” made him cry and he occasionally stopped the car to gently lift dead cats from the road and deposit them under bushes—a tender-hearted joker, if there was such a thing.

But did I truly know him? I had no earthly idea. How well can you know someone you just met online?

Maybe time and circumstance didn’t matter so much in this story. In the handful of weeks since our first irreverent online dating emails—batted back and forth like tennis balls—Jeff had managed to penetrate my formidable wall of reserve. A rare feat. After a week, I agreed to meet him in person. Our first date was more like a reunion than an introduction.

Given our stark differences, the connection was surprising. I spent the first thirteen years of my life in rainy Portland, Oregon. There were seven of us: my parents, my three sisters, my brother, and me. We lived in a 100-year old, one-bathroom Victorian house on Tillamook Street, named after an indigenous tribe in the Pacific Northwest.

My parents chose to homeschool us, partially out of concern over our quality of education and partially out of a deep religious conviction. (I genuinely imagined the local middle school as a den of iniquity littered with condoms and needles). My mother was devout, but she ensured that all five of us were well educated and socially competent. We bore no resemblance to the Christian homeschoolers who were clad in long skirts and denim and forbidden to date or dance.

The summer that the Twin Towers fell, we moved to Fort Worth, Texas. I came of age in Cowtown, where a storm could turn the sky boiled spinach green and snaked rattled in the grass. People loved football (almost) as much as Jesus. In contrast, Jeff had always been a Texas boy. He and his three sisters grew up four hours to the south in Houston and San Antonio.

He spent summers fishing and hunting for Apache arrowheads on the Hill Country farm where his great-great-grandparents built a split log cabin. In college, during his more conservative days at Texas A&M, he was a card-carrying, tobacco-chewing Young Republican who could tear up the country dance floor.

Larger than Life

His personality was like Texas. Larger than life. As a kid, he confided to his doctor that his secret fear was not tarantulas or kidnappers, but spontaneous combustion (like the drummer from Spinal Tap who vanished in a cloud of smoke after a particularly epic drum solo). He was a live conduit, electrifying to everyone he met. (And he’d met a lot of people.) He delighted in sudden intimacy, adventure, spectacle, and flashy colored prints.

Subtle was not in Jeff’s vocabulary, though it was a go-to in mine. All members of my family were dyed-in-the-wool introverts (myself included). If he was the torrid, restless yang, I was the sensitive, introspective yin. For every pair of Jeff’s brightly shaded chinos and lightning-spangled socks, I had a cardigan in heather-gray or cream. My houseplant-to-friend ratio was 10 to 1. I could happily go an entire day without uttering a syllable.

A few weeks into our nascent romance, we took a personality test confirming my suspicion that we had diametrically opposed personality types: he was an alpha go-getter who could charm a gate off its hinges while I was a quiet dreamer who could listen to all thirty-three hours of James Michener’s Poland on cassette tape without dozing off.

At times, people mistakenly interpret my introversion as haughtiness. But Jeff was different. From the first date he made it clear that he was in holy awe of my capacity to sit still and reflect. He treated my penchant for silence as one might treat an alien species under careful observation.

“Just curious. How many words did you speak out loud today?” he asked a week after we met. We were sipping pints in a dim Austin bar.

“Before this beer? I guess I ordered a coffee from the barista this morning,” I said, counting on my fingers. “So, five?”

A little Notebook

He shook his head in wonderment and jotted a few anthropological field notes in the little notebook he always kept in his pocket. “And how many words went through this?” He tapped my head with a wicked smile. “Enough to make me wish there was an off switch,” which had always been true.

We were sun and moon, but it didn’t matter on the night we met: 7:52 p.m. on April 5, 2013—the exact moment of sunset, though I didn’t realize it when he texted me this exact meeting time, a pair of coordinates (30.2747 ° N, 97.9406° W), and a reference picture of a clay star crudely baked into a block of cement.

Meet me on the star, he wrote. It was a plain-looking star with five terra-cotta tips revolving around a bright blue square with a crackdown the middle. The plainness was deceptive. When I typed in the coordinates, they revealed the terra-cotta star inlaid right in front of the most ostentatious building in the entire Austin skyline—the Texas State Capitol.

At 7:20 p.m., I checked my lipstick, practiced what I hoped was a seductive smile, and walked out the front door of my one-room studio. The pink-granite dome of the Texas State Capitol was typically a thirty-minute walk, but that night I covered it in twenty. I moved in long, brisk strides down the sidewalk—an attempt to shake off nerves.

Secretly Married?

I wasn’t nervous about the usual things one might worry about when meeting an online suitor—that Jeff would turn out the be a balding C++ programmer, or secretly married with a dozen kids, or really into latex, or the proud owner of every Beanie Baby model since 1993. I was nervous because I had the impression that some interplanetary body was barreling towards the Capitol, preparing to sweep me into its orbit.

I reached the star before Jeff did. He didn’t appear until dusk, when the streetlights along Congress Street flickered to life. I saw him then—a pair of canary yellow pants winding their way toward the front steps of the dome where I was waiting. He walked right up to the star and boldly kissed me on the cheek. That’s where it started, in a small world that contained everything within itself: long canary pants, a terracotta star, the perfect arc of the dome, and above it all, the last streaks of the April sun.

Buy this book on Amazon No Baggage, a Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering

Clara Benson, author of No BaggageClara Benson is an author and currently resides in Austin, Texas. Her luggage-less adventure began as a Salon.com article and quickly gained international attention. No Baggage is her first book.

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