Not Separate

I first met “C” at a hostel in Moldova some six years ago. I don’t remember how well our initial “small talks” went, but the two of us hung out several times, and I ended up building a sense of brotherhood with him (I’m not sure about his account, though). Not only did we recognize common thoughts and feelings regarding long-term traveling, we also shared some insignificant fun coincidences: man-bun hairstyle, the same age and height, and each having one more brother.

Although we were both multi-year travelers without set plans, I remember thinking of him as the “real” courageous one – I knew I was not. Despite our exterior similarities, I knew that I was traveling with some kind of a backup plan deep inside, for when I would need to go back to my conventional lifestyle. On the contrary, he seemed to have been more fully embracing the uncertainty “now and here” with less prediction about the future.

After some six years, we met again in Warsaw. He’s a foreign resident there, and in some form, he has been still continuing his journey. We met and talked during my entire three-day stay, and it had been a while since I’d experienced this level of engaging sharing of feelings. One interesting piece he shared was that, after he remembered the feeling of “reconnection” this time, he took the courage that night to reinitiate a conversation with an old friend of his, whom he had emotionally pushed away some five years ago. We talked for a while about what we thought friendship was about.

Some years have passed, but I felt that we haven’t really changed in important ways – we still see ourselves as travelers of life, and we keep experimenting, sometimes with excitement and sometimes with nervousness. I think in some ways we were recognizing ourselves in each other – I saw myself in him, and he heard himself in me, even when we were disagreeing. The energy mattered, and the curiosity mattered. It was about remembering that we were not separate.

@Warsaw, Poland, June 2, 2025