What Does It Mean to Travel Alone?

Freedom has a smell, and for me, it's the scent of coconut oil. If it had to be applied to the hair - very long, dark hair - because I was sitting next to her and I could smell it strongly, stronger than the aroma of curry wafting from the dishes. The menu didn't exist; curry was the only choice, by necessity. At the communal table for four, I had my boyfriend in front of me, and she had no one.

We smiled at each other, as one does when they are far from home: she was twenty, just like me, in Thailand like me, but traveling alone. When she told the waitress that she didn't understand why no one came to sit in front of her - who knows how many times a day she had to justify her solitude - it seemed to me that any resemblance between us, even that of the similar yellow tank top we were both wearing, was wiped away by a higher and truer reality: she was a brave girl, and I was not. I could ask my boyfriend to carry my backpack for a bit, to chase the moth out of the room, to lend me his sweater if I was cold or his shoulder if I was sleepy on the bus (oh, so many clichés, all true, by the way). She had to rely on herself, and that was an incredible, crazy, mysterious, and frightening fact for me, and perhaps, more than anything, something I envied deeply.

The coconut-scented girl was just the first in a long line of women I met and got to know on my travels, where I would depart with two, four, sixteen, but never alone. Then, once, it happened: I went to Santo Domingo for ten days. It was inexpensive heroism because I was in a village full of middle-aged Italians who adopted me as the daughter they had left at home, but it was still a baptism of being in the world alone. And to say it: '>. And to have no fear of the thoughts I sensed (but why? So young, doesn't she have a friend?). That trip was the warm-up for the life that awaited me: a life spent traveling for work, often alone. Flights, waits, boredom, sadness, joy, dinners. A million dinners at a table for one, usually near the bathroom, at the exit, at the saloon door of the kitchen. Dinners where I felt observed, and then I would lift my gaze from the book (yes, the book always helps, otherwise, of course, there's always the phone) and I would observe too. Was it embarrassing? A little. Was it useful? Very much.

Traveling alone is like inhabiting a silent place where all the senses are heightened: you feel everything, the conversations of others and what echoes inside yourself. You look with more curiosity, you build unshared memories. And, without witnesses, you can play at inventing a new name, a different story. I don't think I've ever done it, but knowing that I could have was enough for me as an exercise in freedom and imagination. For some years now, my trips have decreased, and my travels have become shorter in time and space. It's also been a while since I traveled alone during my free time, perhaps exhausted by the sense of social solitude experienced - yes, there - when I traveled alone with small children (but that theme deserves a column of its own). I have friends of all ages who organize entire vacations or chunks, alone. The second thing I envy them more than anything is knowing how to recognize their desires and act on them. Not retreating, but making choices, not settling, compromising, sketching, but deciding. The first thing I envy more than anything is valuing oneself.

When I told the coconut-scented girl that she was 'brave,' she smiled and said no. She said it doesn't take courage to travel alone; it takes love. Love for oneself and for the world, which you must trust, believing it will treat you kindly. To say love, she said 'lof' because she was German, and I thought I had misunderstood her English. I had understood correctly; it just took me a long time to truly translate her sentence. (Hi Margaretha, I still remember your name.).

New surrealism. 'As a child, I would go onto the roof of my family's building, look at the sea and the horizon. For me, Casablanca was the end of the world.' So recounts Yassine Alaoui Ismaili (artistically known as Yoriyas), a Moroccan photographer born in '84, about this shot (Like a Dream, Casablanca 2015) that recalls the dreamlike atmospheres of Dalí. The photo is part of a project that began in 2014 entitled Casablanca not the movie: a love letter to his city and an attempt to correct the stereotype of the collective imagination of this tourist destination, tightly linked to the famous film of the same name. (Yoriyas.com, @yoriyas).