“What do you miss most?” is what I usually get asked when I’m back from a trip like this.
A trip where I just put myself out there, to the world, to absorb whatever is spilling out that day.
That’s what these trips are about for me. That’s what I “miss most”, if I had to put my finger on it.
I don’t travel to be different or to feel like someone new. In fact, I’m probably much the same as who I am at home, only unobstructed by my personal rituals, the people I know, the people I love and the places that consume me.
I am un-muted.
When I travel, I’m Me, but free.
I’m a more raw version of myself; someone who, I’ve learned, is sometimes a difficult person to be with, but usually I like her very much, this person I am: she’s the person I choose to spend the most time with, to take for long, toe-blistering walks so that she might surrender her assumptions about loneliness to dust.
Take this photo above. A silly self-indulgent portrait before heading out and treating myself to a quiet dinner for one by candlelight, plus a cup of coffee that keeps me up way too late. And pleasantries exchanged all evening in Portuguese, between the waiter and me, or between me and the couple sitting beside me, making eyes at each other.
I miss the choice of it all, the simple daily decisions, the extraction of the boldest parts of myself.
At home, the possibilities are still abundant, but aimed more perfectly in one direction or another because, as they say, “that’s life”: the accumulation of our daily actions, spread across the span of decades and seen on the face of everyone you’ve ever known, will ever meet and will ever know.
What I “miss the most”, if I had to sum it up (if I really, really had to) are the moments like this one above, when it’s just me and me alone, no one direction to follow, nowhere to be, other than in the place I’m in right then and there.
If I had to sum it up for you, that’s what I miss the most.
-sandy.
