"Farewell Passport" was May 19th's top story on
Apr 09: After 10 years, the time has come to apply for a new passport, and I’m suddenly turning sentimental. When the expired document is returned, its substitute arrives with big pages to fill; a decade’s worth of records is wiped clean. I’m no stamp junkie, but I can’t deny the satisfaction of having requested supplementary pages and almost using them up, too. More importantly, this passport is an abridged catalogue of my roaring 20s – the only object that links backpacking through Europe during college with two years of working in Asia to a seven-month stint in South America. Timelines are preserved in a rainbow of inks.
Happy trails have included tenser moments, notably stuffing it into my underpants in India, putting it under a pillow in Poland, and clutching it in a closet during a super-typhoon in the South Pacific. Good and bad, the memories are many. Resigned to my passport’s obsolescence, I send it off with a
photographic and
poetic retrospective.