Traveling Alone: Some notes.

You get through security seamlessly. You’re surprised, as you always are, that nobody has checked your passport yet. You wait. Then you wait some more. You ration your phone battery so you can listen to choons on the flight. People queue up. The queue always looks like there are far more people than the plane can hold. Still everyone gets on, every single time.
You board and the flight takes off. You sit beside strangers and both parties politely ignore eachother. You brace for landing with the rest of the plane. Everyone fears the landing, but nobody says it. There’s some ironic clapping.
You get up and you go. You’re disoriented as always. Waking up in one country and now, being in another, feels strange. You explore and you watch. The weight of the sheer volume of the city descends, and you wonder how there can actually be that many different lives going on separately, but all together.
People in their early 20s zoom around with hipster cameras and iPhones to try and get pictures worthy of Instagram. The desperation to be seen seems melancholy. You find the parts of this alien place you like and don’t like, and in this way you find the city and the city finds you. It’s far from home but it’s no longer enormous and unknowable.
Travelling alone. What you lose in company you gain in perspective. It’s a-lot easier to get lost for a few hours wandering alone. You get a better feel for whatever place you’re in. I’d recommend it. Not every time you go, but every now and then, do some bits in your own. It’s good for the head and the soul.