“I have a destination, but it’s a place with no coordinates.”
The kilometers slip beneath us, for hours and hours and hours. For days, which sometimes repeat themselves and pass silently, as if unwilling to disturb. For weeks, which we quickly lose count of. For months, which seem eternal but which suddenly leave us finding the tent frozen, even when the sunburns on our skin haven’t yet healed. How many minutes would we spend without speaking, ever, if we could count them? What percentage of our life is spent in absolute verbal silence? How much time is spent without looking into the eyes, without hearing the breathing of someone we’re intimate with?
The sound of the chain, the cars passing by, the music. Everything repeats itself so endlessly that sometimes it ends up becoming a single, indefinite sound, drowned out by our voice, which begins to speak, speak, speak. Without ever opening our mouths. An hour or two to dismantle the tent, an hour or two to reassemble it, cook, make the bed. A silence that speaks. The sound of the pedals, the click of the gearshift, the squeal of the brakes. A horn, which once immediately brought us back to the world, but which today is increasingly less effective. The arm rises automatically, waving, but it’s now a conditioned reflex. We find ourselves, intersection after intersection, wondering how long we’ll continue to go straight down this road, alone. In the next city, anything can happen, just as it can around every bend. It happens constantly and yet never happens. Could it be a constant diversity of what we experience, taken to excess, a sort of routine? Perhaps this life is a bit like working on a painting, focusing on a great wealth of detail, working with extreme attention point by point, day by day, looking very closely. It seems to us that few things are changing, those close to us and those we recognize. Suddenly, however, the phone rings, we need to go to the bathroom, we’re hungry: we stop for a moment. Then we step away and suddenly realize that there are millions of details and that the painting has already become gigantic. But its edges are made of steam, the brushes move like rays, they get soaked in color every time we lift our heads from the pillow, they turn on the radio as soon as we remove our earplugs (or maybe they had never turned it off, not even the night before).
We come to. The tent, the road, lunch, the sunset, the hours spent waiting for sleep in the darkness. Thoughts fill our heads like a desert sky full of stars. The deeper we delve, the more they appear, the more we force our eyes to adjust to the darkness, the more details emerge.
I’m sometimes surprised when some people I meet can talk for hours. My attention span drops after a short while, my brain drifts back into space. I wonder if it’s them who are talkative or if I’m no longer capable of conversing for long. It’s paradoxical that before leaving, I was afraid I wouldn’t meet enough people, and now, after less than ten months, I often find myself completely alone even when I’m in company. By choice.
The only certainty is that there are no certainties. That the plan we have for next week won’t work out, that who we are, and who we think we are, is no longer there the moment we recognize it. That as soon as we feel strong, we’re ready to stumble over the brick we’ve laid ourselves, that when we fear drowning, we’re actually just terribly thirsty.
Among longtime travelers, we all feel like relatives. Distant cousins, whom you’ve never seen but know you have. We smell each other, we get closer, we circle each other. Sometimes we remain cousins, sometimes we become brothers, sometimes we fall in love. We share the same burden, which is also the engine of our happiness. We endure eternity, never knowing if it’s truly the right time, the time to stay or to go, the time to unite or to say goodbye. Who knows if life is simpler with two, or three. We’re all part of the same family, but we’re so profoundly different, even from the second layer of skin. That’s not true, from the first. Each with a personal mission so strong that I wonder: can we ever function together? More than an hour? More than a week? More than a month? For life?
Certainly, alone, we know if, hidden under our pants, our knee bleeds after a fall, how much pain and how much joy. But maybe every now and then we get lost behind a branch full of dry leaves, and a hand that shakes it would let us see a path with fewer potholes.
Maybe everything’s fine, because in any case, life is rich, even with a head full of stars, even with sore knees.
I don’t know. Will we ever be able to?
But in the end, does it matter?
