meanderings from a cold bus in turkey

this has all been too quantitative lately for my qualitative mind.
“this could be the very minute i’m aware i’m alive. all these places feel like home. with a name i’ve never chosen i can make my first steps. as a child of 25.”
i like the world of rainstrewn bus windows where reality is blurred and billboards are more plausibly magical fountains.
there’s nothing more isolating than walking down a street and not understanding a single word around you. and sometimes there’s nothing more wonderful.
the traveler’s life for me has been at once oddly empowering and occasionally reminiscent of changing junior high schools midyear. feeling more confident than ever and wanting to fit in to the latest hostel crowd. and developing confidence is the only reasonable alternative.
“i am on a lonely road and i am traveling. looking for something what could it be?”
somehow traveling has made me simultaneously the most patient version of myself and the most irritable.
“we will never change by relocating. things will always follow us until we decide to change ourselves.”
only a few things have made me cry tears of happiness in the past 6 months and one of them was a starbucks caramel latte.
nothing fosters thought like moving vehicles.
“i like the peace in the backseat. i don’t have to drive. i don’t have to speak. i can watch the countryside and i can fall asleep…”
for a long time i understood the world through a deficiency mindset. whatever i did seemed to be defined by what was not. if i meant to run 5 miles i didn’t focus on the completed 4 miles but the unfinished uno. it’s broken. why does it take so much more effort to revel in what we are and what we’re becoming and stop comparing ourselves to everyone else?
i’m not used to living in a way that isn’t shared with someone. where not every notable event is shared over dinner coffee a walk. where things are only defined by the telling of them.
“together’s not always better but it’s better in the end.”
persistent traveling is like being in a perpetual child-like state. nothing comes easily and assistance from others is essential.
“he allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
it’s still hard for me to not to be a traveler obsessed with capturing each moment for later consumption. a photo a souvenir.
loneliness seems to be the absence of another fully understanding one’s reality. moving about alone makes loneliness almost inherent. the reality that we are all alone and the no one will ever fully understand another’s experience becomes more and more apparent. when you try to make your home everywhere your home is also nowhere.
sometimes i used to get jealous of the people who worked in airports, not the travelers. i imagined them getting off work and walking to their car in the parking lot. getting in and going home to their families and friends. it would be nice. this is the deficiency mode, too. wanting the opposite of what we have rather than reveling in what is.
i forgot to think for myself because i was so afraid of being abandoned. this is like a simulation in free thinking and decision making.
really everything just feels MORE strongly. the spectrum of emotions is lengthened allowing for more radical extremes. there’s less to soften the blows. less noise to cover emotions. no one to divert to.
and it’s all so selfish. and cliché.
“everything we do is judged. we mostly get it wrong. oh well.”