'The Present is a limit... it is a tension between the past and the future. It isn't a Given.'

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What do I want when I travel? To get closer to something, which often means to get farther from something else.

That's oversimplifying and falsely suggesting a distaste for where I began.

It's more like a reprieve from the present.

 Though that sounds like an eventual distaste for where I traveled.

Traveling is a non-space (as you experience in an airport).

 It's a place where new connections feel stronger because within them I am also feeling the loss of the ones I left behind.

I am not referring only to people but to, especially, territories.

I am referring to psycho-geographies (I think).

Traveling requires movement but usually not my own physical movement, not extreme metabolic movement.

These movements leave scars, dirt, exhaustion.

 I am referring to a 'dis-infected' movement.

 

We mount an airplane or a train or a bus or a driver's seat or a bicycle seat and Go Somewhere Else,

at least temporarily.

We take away our own sense of place: we become dis-placed, removed from place.

Our sense of time and space is distorted, more possibilities intuitively seem to exist.

But this displacement is violent. 

 Travel aggressively picks us up with an over-seeing hand and drops us in an arbitrary dot on a map.

We imagine we have more choices, more freedoms, because our usual responsibilities have been removed, hidden.

 If those same responsibilities (family, friends, jobs, homes, etc.) had been removed without warning and without permission? 

I can imagine no greater horror and disappointment.

 They say that the fastest movement in the animal kingdom is caused when an animal is Terrified, is Prey. 

An already agile animal can double or triple her speed if she feels she is being chased.

We cannot suddenly run twice as quickly because we choose to; our body chooses speed for us: out of fear.

 

How is driving any different? 

Is it possible to drive toward something 

(innocent vacation, for instance; New York, for instance) 

without driving away from something else?

I have left places because I had no other choice.

I moved from Beaumont, Texas because had I stayed I would have drowned (I was instead arrested, literally).

I left domestic, married life because I could no longer desire a sense of singular self.

These were, of course (as they always are), paths of my own making.

But even if I've built my own predator, it doesn't make my fear any less palpable or abundant.

 To 'dis-place' one's self for fun and by choice is no less dangerous.

 

To vacation is to move, let's say in a car, from one city to another.

 It is to mount (as you would a horse) a seat and, without expending any real corporeal energy, 

travel a distance that, these days, would be improbable for most people (and their lifestyles) on foot.

My body situates itself in a metallic rectangle for the sake of movement -- is this not a prosthesis?

 Body & Car become hybrid, an erotic coupling for the sake of movement, for the sake of out-running terror.

I extend myself (prosthesis of the car) to extend myself (to a new geographical place).

The word to define this is: progression?