Wherever You Go: Traveling With Your Own Shadow
The train shudders to life, metal grinding against metal, and I taste copper in my mouth—the flavor of departure. My reflection fragments across the window as we lurch forward, splitting me into a thousand uncertain selves. The ticket stub grows damp between my sweating fingers.
We are archaeologists of our own ruins, packing carefully curated lies into suitcases. Clean shirts to cover yesterday’s mistakes. Comfortable shoes for walking away from ourselves. That book we’ll never read—a prop in the theater of transformation we’re directing. But the heaviest cargo travels ticketless: the sediment of every unfinished conversation, every moment we chose silence when we meant to scream.
Distance is the cruelest magician—it promises everything, delivers geography.
The brochures peddle sunsets like salvation. Buy this ticket, breathe this foreign air, become the person you were meant to be. We purchase coordinates as if longitude could cure loneliness, as if altitude might elevate our souls. Prague will teach us wisdom. That mountain peak holds answers in its morning mist.
I learned the truth on a beach in Santorini, salt stinging my eyes—not from the wind, but from recognition. My chest tightened with the same familiar ache that visits me in my bedroom at 3 AM. The Mediterranean stretched endless and blue, but my internal weather remained the same gray drizzle. Different sand, same restless heart hammering against its cage.
You cannot outrun your pulse. You cannot leave your thoughts at customs.
Yet here’s the paradox that keeps me traveling: we carry ourselves everywhere, but we also discover ourselves everywhere. The self isn’t luggage to discard—it’s the very instrument through which we receive the world. Every sunset burns through my particular lens of longing. Every mountain peak I climb with my specific collection of inherited fears and half-forgotten hopes.
Standing in a crowded Tokyo station, crushed between strangers speaking languages I cannot name, I feel my son’s curious questions echoing in the cacophony: “Baba, what makes people move so fast when they’re not even running?” His voice, carried across oceans in my memory, makes me see these rushing commuters differently—not as obstacles, but as fellow travelers in the human comedy.
We don’t escape ourselves; we escort ourselves to new theaters of self-discovery.
My wife finds Morocco in our balcony garden, watching morning light fracture through the water she pours on modest flowers. She has learned what I am still learning: the art of traveling well with your own company. Not fleeing from your thoughts, but inviting them to dance with new landscapes.
The train slows now, brakes squealing their metal prayer. My palms have dried. The copper taste fades, replaced by anticipation’s metallic cousin—acceptance. I step onto the platform carrying every question I boarded with, but something fundamental has shifted during the journey.
Not the questions themselves. My relationship to them.
I am learning to introduce myself to myself in foreign cities, to shake hands with my own uncertainty beneath unfamiliar stars. To stop seeing my persistent self as the enemy of adventure and start recognizing it as adventure’s most intimate co-conspirator.
The real journey isn’t to somewhere else. It’s to the place where you can finally say to your own reflection: Hello, stranger. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.
Who is this person I carry everywhere? And what if the destination was never about leaving them behind, but about learning to travel together—two souls sharing one suitcase, negotiating the itinerary of being human?
