The wind hit her already cold body, as she was walking the streets of New york in the early morning hours and reminiscing. 

She remembered the first time she felt safe. 

They were just a bunch of kids back then, even though it was not too many years ago.

But if you count age in years rather than experience, the two of them would be the youngest people on earth.

She was sitting there, on a tiny little rock, next to a guy that used to be so important to her, and now she can’t even remember his name. She remembered his smell, and the sound of his voice but that was about it. 

 

He didn’t love her, but he loved the world just as much as she did, and that was enough for her.  

They were sitting next to each other taking about the world like it was a fantasy land yet to be explored. 

And for the first time, they said things out loud that they never said before.

Dreams, ideas and hopes too big for a town like theirs. Too big to say out loud.

”I wanna have a billions of love affairs in Paris…and I want to see beauty through a lens in India ” she said, and then their list went on. 

When they were out of outspoken wishes, but not even near to be done with dreams, they looked at each other. 

” Aren’t we crazy for wanting all this?” she said as she was staring at her hands in front of her, shaping and moving them as a butterfly.

”Aren’t we absolutely nuts for craving the world this much?” She said as he answered her with a smile, but greeted her with silence.

”Or maybe they’re the crazy ones, for settling I mean. But what if we’re just young? What if we’ll become like them. Forever stuck on the same job, house, with the same lover and we’re not happy, but just about happy enough. I hope forever isn’t for anyone. But what if that’s what we become? When we’re not so goddam young anymore” she said as her hands started shaking and her face expression went blank, as if the image playing in her head scared her. 

And he finally ended the silence, still smiling at her in comfort.

”Babe, that doesn’t sound much like settling down but giving up. And it don’t sound much like you. You will never become what you were expected to be. You’re already better than that. You’re so much better than them all. ”  

 

 

She crossed the street like a black cat, and cars around her started honking and  woke her up from her visit on memory lane. 

The neon lights and the city noise from the road kept her company as she got closer to her apartment. She hadn’t thought of him for years.

Not when she was in Paris, with one of all her lovers, not in rome drinking his favorite cheap wine, not when she took photos of the Viagra Falls, not when she played with children with the brightest smiles in Africa.

She had spent years of traveling, without even thinking of him once.

But on the day where she signed the papers of her first permanent apartment, he popped up in her head.

 

He was dead now, and she couldn’t help to wonder if he loved the world a little bit too much, or if he lived life a little bit too fast.

 

Here she was in New york, the gathering pot for the people that refused to settle, whose only forever was themselves, whose journey towards their dreams and goals were a never ending road. 

 And as she met hundreds of people on the street, going in different directions in their life, she felt herself merging into that pot. The dreamers, the doers, the travelers.

And as she looked at the faces of people she never met, she felt safe again.

She was alone without feeling lonely. 

And that’s probably the reason why people travel.

Sometimes you feel at home in places and people you weren’t suppose to belong to.

And that’s the greatest journey of all, the search of whatever place that may be.