If you're reading this, I'm already gone
Current status: in love in Europe
On The Cusp is about becoming the next version of ourselves. That means experimenting with the breadth of our interests, exploring the depths of anything that captures our imagination, and learning to embrace uncertainty along the way.
Welcome! This is letter #61.
“What if we just…stayed in Europe longer?”
My boyfriend posed the question casually, as if he were suggesting we drop by Bar Rosa that night for a shared pizza and a couple of IPAs.
But to me, that was an incomprehensible approach to our ten-day trip abroad. Nothing about “going to Europe” felt casual.
Exhilarating, definitely. I could already picture us peering up at the imposing stone architecture of Edinburgh’s Old Town, or pulling on our hiking boots for a long walk through a damp, mossy glen in the Scottish Highlands.
But when my romantic European daydreams concluded, another feeling arrived to replace them—a surprise, unwelcome visitor, one who lingered too long and threatened to kill the whole vibe.
Cue the tiny violins: I was a little bit stressed out by the prospect of extending our vacation.
I ran my first marathon at the tender age of eighteen.
“Ran” might not be wholly accurate, though I did jog the first twenty miles without drama. It was the last 6.2 in which I slowed to a crawl, covering the distance on glycogen-depleted, jetlagged legs over more Roman cobblestones than I care to remember.
My dad and I had spent an entire Chicago winter’s worth of Sunday mornings slogging through double-digit long runs, raising money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training in exchange for a pair of Italian race bibs.
After our father-daughter marathon, we spent the next three weeks alongside my spectator brother on the world’s best refueling tour. In Florence, we ate every meal except for breakfast at Trattoria Zà Zà, where I discovered that ribollita—a rich, stewy tangle of Tuscan kale, white beans, and day-old bread—was much more than the sum of its parts.
Three years later, we spent another glorious three weeks in Turkey, occupying ourselves in Istanbul with squares of syrup-soaked cake from street vendors and backgammon games with friendly strangers. Then, we covered a large swath of the country by rental car, pausing for daytime bike rides across Kapadokya’s lunar landscape and evening views of the glittering seaside towns whose lights twinkled as the sun dipped below the Mediterranean.
These two trips were my first and only brushes with the kind of lengthy cultural immersion that unfolds slowly and luxuriously like honey off a spoon, the kind that births lasting obsessions—like my subsequent year of Turkish language study, conducted in hopes that I might return someday, this time for a whole year. I kept my notebooks from those two college semesters; they’re yellowing on my bookshelf but begging to be revisited, filled from cover to cover with verb conjugations and vocabulary practice.
But it’s been sixteen years since I spent a full three weeks exploring anyplace new, and eleven years since I took my last flight abroad (though I have crossed the Canadian border many times). Each year, some combination of American PTO policies, budget constraints, and life circumstances got in the way.
This year, I could no longer hide behind any of those previously-valid excuses. So: why not now? “What if we just…stayed in Europe longer,” indeed?
“I’ll look into it,” I promised, speaking from my dais as Resident Manager of Logistics. I was already certain that “looking into it” meant “uncovering reasons that made it inconvenient and expensive enough as to be completely unfeasible.”
The first step, of course, was to make sure that the kids would be taken care of. I texted our catsitter, apologizing for making such an audacious inquiry. Surely she had other conflicts on the books?
She wrote back almost immediately: “I’m happy to stay an extra week!”
But surely the plane ticket change fees would be exorbitant—that is, if changing our flights was even an option. I braced myself to sit on hold forever with the airline.
“If you want to make a change, you only have to pay the difference in fares,” the Aer Lingus employee soothed me in his lilting Irish brogue, approximately thirty seconds after I dialed their corporate customer service number.
This was unexpected. “So I could stay longer, and fly back from an entirely different city”—I threw some hypothetical adjustments his way—“and it would only cost…”
“About a hundred and fifty dollars. For both tickets,” he clarified before my lips could form the question.
That was all well and good. But surely all those extra nights of lodging would break the bank?
Then I remembered my stash of unused credit card points, the travel equivalent of a treasure chest overflowing with gold bullion and loose gemstones.
And that’s how I ran out of excuses and found myself booking a last-minute extension of our Scotland trip: the Amsterdam leg, complete with a day trip to Brussels for Belgian waffles, chocolate, and beer.
Maybe I’m out of practice when it comes to traveling, or I’ve just mistaken self-denial for a personality trait.
But fresh off a rough stretch of road in my personal life, the idea of cavorting around Europe for three whole weeks sounded so monstrously self-indulgent that I was almost waiting for someone to pop out and order me to reverse course. “Sorry, ma’am, you need a permit to have this much fun!”
In a world filled with suffering—suffering that, until recently, included my own—I wondered: is it really okay to traverse that same globe suspended in a bubble of joy?
But then I remembered how fragile and ephemeral bubbles are, liable to be pricked by the sharp ends of question marks—either the uncertainties we know are coming for us, or the ones that take us by surprise.
In that moment, instead of holding the line at a “reasonable” ten-day trip, I adopted a different approach. Because who knows when I’ll be in love in Europe again, wandering unfamiliar city streets hand in hand, ending up wherever beckons or intrigues us? The last time I blinked, years of my life went by.
Instead of denying myself the most expansive version of this experience, I leaned into the kind of immersion that unfolds slowly and luxuriously like honey off a spoon, the kind that births lasting obsessions.
Next time my boyfriend asks, “What if we just…?” I hope I can smother my inclination to answer with all the reasons we can’t, and respond instead with the golden rule of improv in mind: “Yes, and…!”
Are you following along with my year of pizza on YouTube? Here’s the latest installment of the In Depth Cookbook Club! ⬇️
Step into my kitchen, where I’m making the Grandma-Style Pizza with Potato and Rosemary (p. 177) and the Vegan Kale Caesar Salad with Pickled Onions (p. 179) from ’s wonderful cookbook Pizza Night.1
As the title of today’s essay indicates, I’m currently in Scotland! I’ve turned off comments on today’s letter; consider that my little “out of office” message. (You can also expect things to be quiet around here for the next month, as I’ll be taking a vacation from publishing the newsletter and video series while I’m away.)
In case you missed it, I wrote about the context for my Scotland trip last July:
It’s about why I didn’t travel last year, but it’s also about the ways in which my late mother (who—coincidence?—was obsessed with Walker’s Shortbread, a Scottish delicacy) inspired the adventure I’m on today.
I can’t wait to reconnect and share more about this meaningful trip when I return.
Warmly,
Maddie
If you buy Pizza Night through my Bookshop.org affiliate link, you’ll be supporting this video series! That’s because each purchase made through the link earns me a small commission. All opinions are honest and entirely my own, regardless of affiliation.