the versions of me i leave behind
I’m beginning to think I don’t only miss places.
I miss myself in them.
There is a version of me who exists somewhere in the mornings of Tokyo. She wakes before her alarm because there is too much she wants to see. She walks farther than I ever would at home, eats breakfast alone without calling it lonely, and somehow finds it perfectly reasonable to spend an afternoon wandering with nowhere particular to be.
I miss her when I leave.
I miss the version of me who sits too long at cafés in cities where nobody knows my name. The one who says yes more easily, gets lost without becoming irritated, wears the dress she packed for no particular occasion. She seems lighter somehow. More curious. Less concerned with getting back to whatever comes next.
Then the trip ends.
The suitcase opens on my bedroom floor. Receipts fall out. Foreign coins find their way into drawers. Within days, I am answering alarms, checking the time, taking the same roads again.
And she begins to feel very far away.
It’s strange to feel homesick for a person rather than a place.
Sometimes I’ll hear a song I played constantly on a trip, or find a train ticket tucked inside an old bag, and for a second I remember exactly how it felt to be her.
Not just where I was.
Who I was there.
Maybe that's why leaving certain places has always made me unexpectedly sad. I thought I was saying goodbye to streets, cafés, hotel rooms, views.
I wasn't.
Somewhere along the way, I had met another version of myself.
And every plane home has asked me to leave her there.