Three years ago, I opened a new chapter of my life with a book. I spent the summer working on the road, giving tours to iconic American locales - Yosemite National Park, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, New York - in a large bus built for shuttling people to airport terminals. It was an adventure, one that was formative and destructive in equal parts. I had learned so much about myself and other people, but it took years to realize the full breadth of it.

The book in question was Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Marquéz. The narrative begins with the death of Dr. Ubino, a nationally respected doctor and husband to Fermina Daza. After his wake, our protagonist Florentino Ariza waits until everyone has left to approach Fermina with a dramatic proclamation, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." And so Marquéz launches an exhaustive inquiry into the true nature of love through the intertwined lives of Fermina and Florentino, a number of salacious trysts, and some bad poetry.

I opened it on my parents couch in late summer, while I was killing time before the starting a job as a ski instructor in Colorado. It’s a perfect story to read while lounging on a couch in a darkened living room against the afternoon heat; in the late morning under the shade of black walnut trees; in bed at night, window cracked to let thunder and rain into your room.

In those languid moments, it’s easy to read the book as a love story in the classic sense - two young lovers separated by a cruel father, then time and circumstance, find their way into a blossoming relationship in the twilight of their lives. But the truth is more complicated than we would like to believe, especially after waking up from an afternoon nap in your childhood home. Marquéz himself remarked in an interview, "you have to be careful not to fall into my trap."

While reading the Love in the Time of Cholera, I bought a rusty old Jeep. Its paint had faded with time. "The last guy to come by left without even driving it, after seeing the color," said the previous owner. The cherry red coat had given away to pink. Salmon if you heard me tell it. My idea was to drive it cross country, from Pittsburgh, up through both the peninsulas of Michigan, down by Minneapolis, then to Colorado. First I had to learn to drive stick.

Obstacles didn’t concern me, though. I was in love with the road. Any time staying put felt wasted. I had come to rely on a new destination everyday, sometimes one that was hundreds of miles across state. Once, when I was on tour in Austin Texas, a passenger asked if I had some quarters to do laundry. "I have some at home," I replied, pointing to the bus. "If that’s not the perfect summation of your life at the moment, I’m not sure what is," she said. It felt right, living out of three bags, chewing away miles on an open road, seemingly free of mundane things like rent and a nine to five.

There was a cost to all of that, one that I couldn’t fully articulate until a few days ago when I finished another one of Marquéz’s books: One Hundred Years of Solitude. I hadn’t planned on reading it this summer; it fell into my lap when an itinerant glass blower named Mike was working out of the studio in our garage. He too lives out of three bags and wakes up in different cities, leaving whenever he sees fit. Before he left this time around, he tossed me One Hundred Years and I started it the next day.

The two works share a similar scope and setting. Both take place over long periods of time, stretching the experience of reading from days to something that seems like months. They concern themselves with eras gone by in far flung provinces of Colombia. Love, and the lack thereof, are continuous themes. But where Love takes place over one lifetime, One Hundred Years, as the title suggests, follows an aristocratic family through eight generations as they try to escape the destinies set out for them in their names.

The story begins with the patriarch José Arcadio Buendía. After running from the ghost of a man he killed in a duel, he founds the city of Macondo with his family. Macondo grows, evolves, then ultimately withers and dies along with the Buendía name. Magic is ever present. Hordes of yellow butterflies mourn doomed lovers, flying carpets zoom past open windows, virgins ascend to heaven, destinies are told in cards and ancient languages. Like Love, One Hundred Years is perfect to read in a hammock under the shade of lodgepole pines during high summer. But the warnings against solipsism and materialist living are clear. The men in the Buendía family are obsessive to the point of insanity; their pride and stubbornness most often lead them into circular lives, borne alone.

Back in Pittsburgh, after I finished Love and saw only the beauty in Florentino’s life and none of the hypocritical ugliness Marquéz hides behind the curtains, I loaded the Jeep up with my snow gear and three bags. I started out for Colorado, battling check engine lights and a sticky third gear that always seemed to grind, even if you hit the clutch twice before shoving the stick home. I camped by myself on Lake Superior, under cold rain. In Minneapolis, I met another wayward friend preparing for a trip across Asia. The old truck only got sixteen miles to the gallon so I filled up three times in a day during the sprint across Nebraska. Once I got to Colorado, I spent the winter sleeping on couches, taking ski trips, almost always alone or surrounded by aquatencies of convenience.

By the end of the following summer, I was starved for something more substantive. “Life is just the dumb shit I do in between trips,” I remember telling a friend, while camping in the Tetons. I was disillusioned and more than a little lonely from a year on the move. It felt like running in place.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a larger than life figure in One Hundred Years, spends his life launching and fighting thirty two wars against the conservative regime of colonial Colombia, never knowing why until the last, doomed attempt, in conversation with his second in command:

"Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?" "What other reason could there be?" Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. "For the great Liberal party." "You're lucky because you know why," he answered. "As far as I'm concerned, I've come to realize only just now that I'm fighting because of pride."

After his bitter realization, the Colonel spends the rest of his years meticulously crafting fishes out of silver, only to melt them down and begin again.

One Hundred Years found me at another transitional period, but an altogether different one. I now have those mundane things like rent, and I’m working towards that nine to five. I also have a girlfriend and a cat. My vision for what my life should be like has snapped into focus, on an entirely different target than what I thought it might three years ago. Rather than be blinded by unbending devotion to a hollow ideal, I decided to do better.

Towards the tail end of Love in the Time of Cholera, the Florentino sees the full length of his life and the turns it’s taken, "He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves."