Traveling is one of the most treasured things for the people who spend their lives trying to find the infinite worlds within themselves. The love for always being on the road, for always going somewhere, it keeps the heart from feeling stagnant. The idea about the journey being more important than the destination is the truest thing for such people. While you’re traveling, and especially if you’re traveling on your own, you’d be all that you’ve got. You’ll meet people as you reach places, and on your way, but at the end of the day, you’d sleep telling yourself about all the things you’ve on the list for tomorrow, or even better, you won’t think about a tomorrow at all because your today gave you so much more to relish.
When you get used to the whole idea about being a wayfarer, you’ll stop going around with a notebook and pen asking each and every one you meet for their numbers because they won’t matter anymore than they mattered in those very few moments they spent with you. They’re meant to survive in your memory only in those peculiar moments, as a pink-cheeked child who smiled at you from beyond a picket fence in Ladakh, or as a man who smelled of cigarettes and who wore a leather jacket, telling you about how he grew up in Spain, although he’s Tibetan. Even the boy who gave you space in his house to live for a couple of days, and how you started to spend nights, sleeping while you were entwined within him, it won’t remain the same when you leave. People who meet you on the road are the people who teach you the most amazing lessons in life, but there’s a reason they pass you by and don’t stay. The Himalayan guy whose father was Italian, and who studied for 15 years to become a monk, while being in control of his life outside the commitments he’d have had to make, he taught me great lessons about balance. His sister, who lived in a wooden house on top of a hill, with her Swedish boyfriend, taught me a lesson about keeping your family close, and your dog closer. The Belgian man who ran the best restaurant in that small Himalayan village taught me about lessons in love. He stayed back in India because he fell in love with a Himachali woman who then bore him 3 beautiful kids.
All of these people will remain in my memory as some of the best people I’ll ever meet, but I know they won’t last in my life as it is. I’ll see them if I visit those paths again and we’ll greet each other like friends who spent many great evenings together, lost in wine and music we’ll never understand, but that’s all there will be. There will be people who you’d eventually fall in love with, and you’d spend nights by the waterfall, trapped between each other’s arms and a shawl, but eventually, you might have to let go of each other, like the stars that will fall down that night. Sometimes you’d find yourself out into the open, in a field filled with all the things you’ve ever wanted to be, petals and thorns, surrounded by bricks and stones, and that’s where you’ll find yourself because these are the moments that tell you about yourself the most. They carve out whatever you had failed to find within yourself earlier. They make you who you’re supposed to be, infinite within yourself, among a million possibilities, in the middle of nowhere, around nobody you know. That’s where you’ll find yourself.
This entry has been shortlisted for Holidify’s Travelogue Writing Contest in association with Linger. The content and pictures may not be used without prior permission of the author.
Submitted by: Zoya Singh
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