New Friends? – Jaipur, India
When you go away, when you travel, you will not be alone, unless you choose to be. You will meet people, boys, girls, all ages, sizes, colours and orientations. They will be weird and beautiful and interesting and intense and funny and challenging and completely wonderful. You will love some of them. Inevitably, you will hate some of them. Some will become best friends for life, others for the best 2 weeks of your life, never to be seen again. Here and there, you may fall in love. Maybe you’ll wish you hadn’t, but no doubt, your life will be full when traveling. There is no shortage of anything – new friends, new foods, new sights, new smells and sounds and cultural dances and bonfires on the beach and skinny dipping in the sea.
But what happens when you go home?
Some travellers are permanent nomads, true vagabonds. Home has no meaning for these people. For the rest of us, even long-term travellers, we still maintain some connection to somewhere (or someone) called Home.
Go home, and the air stops moving. The bed each night is the same. The dinner table is predictably set at the same time. Work starts, work stops. The seconds pass, and suddenly remembering what you did 2 nights ago is a challenge. On the road, every moment is burned onto the very folds of your cortex. It’s hard to make things matter at home like they matter out there, when everything is new. Still, we try. We know we must try. We do our best. We always do our best.
We reach out to friends.
Suddenly, you find many of them are recently engaged, married, having babies. They are buying houses and planning time with their families at the cabin. Suddenly, the void you left them with when you went galavanting around the globe is filled with other things. Wife. Husband. Dog. Mortgage. New truck. Hoarded vacation days for that 1 week all-inclusive trip to Mexico. Suddenly, everyone has moved on.
You get together. You chat. You try to explain the things you experienced. You try to relate to their parenting woes. You sit silently on the couch and wait while baby is soothed. Thumbs twiddle. You wish you could help, you wish you could be needed, but you know there isn’t much you can do, not really. There is a disconnect, and you realize you aren’t surprised. Disappointed, sure, but this is the natural course of life, right? It’s just not your course. You just always danced to the twang of your own ukulele (on the white sandy beaches of Easter Island).
You remember how close you used to feel to these friends, the friends who have moved on. You are thankful for the wonderful memories you have together. Nothing, no one, can take those away. You remember when you called each other best friend, when you drank rum together until the wee hours of the morning, when you went to blues concerts and cried/celebrated together over breakups. You are eternally grateful for these memories; life without ever having had them would feel empty. Only now, the memories are just a shadow of what once was. No longer is it the hilarious glue that holds everything together but an echo of something that once was and will be no more.
Your friends have moved on.
You know in your heart you will always love these people. They probably have no idea how happy you are for them, how much you really love them, for travellers feel indescribably deeply, passionately. You understand this is not a comfortable level of emotion for a lot of people, particularly those who have never traveled or left home. You are happy to simmer that sentiment in silence, while the baby in the background screams. You excuse yourself, it’s time to go. You know the next time you see your friend will be weeks away, rather than days. Schedules are so tight now. When did that happen?
These are the good friends.
There are also the friends who never understood. Why travel, why leave for so long, what are you doing… This simple lack of comprehension was the initial wedge in the imperfectly formed contour of your bond. Each departure nudged the wedge in a little more, until one day, you come home, and you find you are no longer friends.
Good riddance, you should say, but it still hurts. You loved – love – these friends. Saying a permanent goodbye to someone you once called best friend is earth-shattering. Yet you are forced to accept this with some kind of dignity.
Home has become lonely.
Your best friends are spread out across the world. They are from Brazil, Denmark, Mexico, Ireland, Australia, Sweden, England. They are waiting to host you the next time you travel. They invite you to take a trip specifically to go see them.
You wonder why you ever missed home in the first place, and why you’ve defined home the way you have. Yet, the concept of home persists. And loneliness persists. It’s not just the post-trip blues. This is pervasive.
Something needs to change.
You realize the only course of action is to start from scratch. New friends, new bonds, new chums for wasting time together. The more you think about it, the more you realize this is not as easy to accomplish as it might sound. Finding someone likeminded while traveling has always been fairly straightforward. If it weren’t, sharing your company with just the Taj Mahal, or just the Eiffel Tower or just Central Park is more than alright. At home, trying to find someone like you is, quite simply, daunting. Nerve-wracking. An insurmountable task. A frightening feat of vulnerability and high potential for rejection. But this is what has to happen.
You can fly to Brazil, India, the Middle East all by yourself. You can wander the streets of Madrid alone. You can get through all of Southeast Asia without being robbed. You can stumble through China without a lick of the language. You can eat all the creepy crawly and strange smelling things at the market, but make a friend at home???
I don’t know about you… but this one, I’m still trying to figure out.
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Is “home” lonely for you? What are you doing to tackle the feeling? Let’s discuss!
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