On travelling

My journeys don’t end in lovers meeting. My journeys don’t end.

I’m leaving soon, again. I’ve been living in a permanent liminal state for so many years that it turned from a thrill into a bother.

When I go shopping, I pass people in the street and I’m envious of their lives: staying in one place and just popping out to the shops where the shopkeepers know every client by sight, where the exchange of a greeting is always the same, always in the same language, one’s native one. I’m envious of the lives that allow for the usual debris of daily life on a kitchen countertop and flowerpots on a windowsill, with no cardboard boxes and rolls of bubble wrap stored at the bottom of the wardrobe, no thoughts about what to pack up, what to sell, and what to leave behind.

I wish for a place to unpack once and for all, for a windowsill that would hold a collection of cacti, for a spot on a kitchen shelf where I would put my favourite coffee mug unwrapped from the bubble wrap, for the certainty that I wouldn’t ever have to wrap it up again. I want to learn by heart the way to the local baker’s to the point where every crack in the pavement would be so familiar that I wouldn’t notice any more that it was there but at the same time were sure that it would always be there for me to tread on, and that I would always be there to tread on it. 

I long for a place to call home.