This year I am thirty. The road trip was a fantasy began in mid 1998 when I first left Korea and thought I'd be in the States temporarily before moving back. But I didn't move back, of course. And during that time I never had a good enough income to support owning a car. Besides, everything fell apart and living became unwieldy.

For a long time I wondered if things would resolve by the time I turned thirty, all the while aware that even wondering about an arbitrary yet significant milestone exacerbated the pressure to fix things quickly and to measure sanity by. That pressure undermined the natural course of things.

As it turns out, much has neatly resolved itself in the last half year, the best feature of which is feeling free. Reflecting on the last decade I remember that it also began with a feeling of freedom - feeling free like racers at the starting gate do.

Adulthood at twenty is a brand new Etch A Sketch. You imagine the beautiful and intricate designs you're going to draw but as soon as you begin it's obvious how limited your movement is, how unskilled you are at doing it. Pretty soon you've made a mess and want to shake the whole thing up and start over but -- this is where the metaphor breaks down -- you can't.

Most of my twenties I felt so trapped I started to feel like I was dying. In the middle of 1998 I began to crawl out. That's three years ago. That's a long time to end anything.

Somehow you think endings only take months, but if you've been in a relationship for a long time or some circumstance where living and family arrangements are shared, or where there's too much of you at stake, this kind of thing takes years. And you know it's really hard to be patient for the ending to finish. You believe in next year and next year things are only improved, or maybe it's better to say worsened, toward the outcome.

Next year. Next year.

This year things are different and around springtime I definitely started to feel freedom sweeter than the freedom you feel at twenty, because at twenty you don't know self-inflicted captivity. At least until that age you believe any captivity you experience is at the hands of parents or other authoritative institutions. Later, if you're lucky, you see how much you collude against yourself.

Anyway, all of this is undoing.

I'm free and I'm pretty sure I won't give it up. To celebrate that, I decided to head west with fantasy: The car, the bike and the laptop.

I love being alone. But I was surprised not to feel at all lonely or vulnerable on the road in the middle of America. Toward the end of it, I knew I could travel for months like that talking and keeping company with strangers along the way. Everyone loves a single woman traveler. People are kind and interested in your adventures. They see you and you're the one they ask for directions. It's sad how they keep telling us it's dangerous to travel alone. All the usual statements about carrying pepper spray and being inside after dark. All of those warnings we wear like veils.

And one thing I love about traveling is anticipating the epiphanies that will come. Here is something I wrote to Blunt before he went traveling alone across the US, intent to gain some perspective.

No matter what you expect to think about or hope to achieve, the unanticipated will take hold and reorient you, if only slightly and at some unpredictable future moments. And despite uncountable hours of perfectly memorable living, these few will remain as some that you actually lived.

This is always true for me. This time while I was traveling -- through Santa Fe and Los Alamos -- I suddenly knew I'd be fine to never hear word of Dave again. I knew that whatever remained of those years, those twenties, didn't apply to the present. I started making plans for giving up the box of his stuff to his parents and for packing away whatever memorabilia I had around from that time.

For a long time I couldn't reconcile how someone who was essentially family, someone who lived with me for seven years could, in effect, no longer exist. It seemed necessary that such a person always be accessible in some way. But it's not.

You outgrow loss even as you cling to it. At some point you might realize you've already forgotten details, or can't imagine with acuity exactly what that other person or place feels like. Then you see that you're already gone from there and drifting farther yet.

To know that you can leave something so formative behind is absolute freedom. And the epiphany from this trip is that with this knowledge any involvement can be resolved, no matter the duration or how seemingly indispensable.

And Blunt too. I saw him at the symphony with Kristin and didn't feel compelled to make them aware of me. I didn't want them to see how I was dressed; I wanted to keep the evening to myself.

The last time we spoke he said he thought he'd helped me regain a sense of my own beauty. I didn't want to let him have that claim. In that context, the assumption felt like a contradiction.

What I really learned was how to relish the preciousness of moments. When you live as though each time you see a person is the last time and you let yourself feel the fear that comes with that, you know the only choice you have is to drive straight through the center of it and be how you'd be if you didn't feel fear.

You feel invincible living like that.

This is a universal teaching, I know. But how well do you actually live it? I was conscious of that fear for a while. But when you feel free, it's difficult to keep that knowledge proximate when you've got a new lover bearing all the time in the world, or when you still feel young and invincible. I try to think about it every day because the difference between merely feeling free and being an agent in your own existence is the degree to which you can keep that truth conscious. And being free is not enough for me.