Traveling alone is a curious sensation. As a first time solo traveler, I had no clue what to expect.
It wasn’t loneliness, really, this feeling that swept over me as I wandered through this foreign place where no one knew my name, where I had no connections.
As someone who spends a lot of time on my own in my daily life, it wasn’t completely new to me.
Yet I couldn’t help but feel that something, perhaps someone, was missing. A piece of me gone, maybe lost along the journey? Or maybe it was just the sense of being outside myself, not completely connected in this new placate, in these new surroundings.
So as the day went on I allowed myself to get tangled up in myself. I let my brain wander to wherever it wished to go. To the good and bad thoughts, the happiness and sadness. I felt it all. More than I have allowed myself to feel in a long, long time.
I had no one to report to. No responsibilities. No overlapping obligations to run back and forth from and to. I was free.
I wasn’t Evan, the graduate student, running store associate, Senate employee from Pennsylvania living in Virginia… I was simply a tall girl with short blonde hair wandering aimlessly though the streets of Reykjavik with her camera glued to her hands and her eyes fervently seeking discovery through her thick rimed glasses.
I was alone, unattached, able to be exactly the person I wanted to be in that moment.
It was both invigorating and frightening. Simultaneously exhilarating yet entirely unnerving.
There are so many words to describe this feeling that I can picture in my head that I can’t quite seem to get out.
But at the end of today, I find myself happy and content. Having made some friends along the way, I see it’s not so much a matter of who you wish yourself to be but who you allow yourself to be. To these new friends I was simply me, and that was enough.
Evan Petschke 