The beaches, hostels, trips and travel mates reluctantly need to make way to taxes, (un)employment, room rentals, housemates and wages. The traffic is organized, the streets are clean, the food is tasteless. Your friends talk about TV commercials and you have nothing to say. You sit in the backyard, watching the hot air balloons wondering what happened to your life, to your consistent planning, to your ambitions and desires. They have left without a trace.
You find yourself staring at an advertisement “Aruba v.a. 500 Euro” on the bus stop and drift back there. Back to the scorching heat, back to the mosquito nets, back to the rum cocktails with people from all over the world. The bag pack is empty, the bank account is empty, and your head seems to be empty. But its not. It's filled up with memories, with hellos and goodbyes in 20 different languages, with random cultural facts, city maps, with various currency exchange rates – info that was a survival necessity just a few weeks ago and now becomes completely useless.
So what can you do while sipping on a tasteless carton juice box? Sitting, waiting, wishing.
It just seems amazing how your life changes with an online booking. Select, pay, confirm and that's it, your own ticket to the other side of the world, the other type of life that used to be yours.
It is yours, all these lives are yours, they exist simultaneously, you exist in many dimensions. And when they clash you witness tiny emotional explosions. Seeing my Indonesian simcard at the bottom of my bag in Breda was the saddening but necessary collision of two worlds that will probably never meet again. But when the ceiling is high and I am drifting in that direction, all these worlds come back, all my parallel personalities seem so close and vibrant. That's why I can never stay.
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