The hardest part: the return from a long trip

  Marica   |     30/09/2016

It happens sometimes, especially when returning from a trip, to feel paralyzed. As if time had trapped you in a space that you cannot recognize, in which you feel tight.
If you're lucky, it's a feeling that is relieved by listening to some music or looking at old pictures. But it almost always comes back. And there is no music or movie or friend that can help you.

So you understand that you need to give yourself some time. You realize that you desperately need that space in which you are trapped. You need to give free rein to nostalgia, happiness and imagination. The nostalgia of what you have experienced, the joy of moments of pure adrenaline and the imagination that all this is not over yet. Yes, because the truth is that those moments won't come back anymore. But you only want to re-experience those feelings for a few minutes. Exactly as when you wake up from a beautiful dream and you try to keep it alive because it seemed so real that it cannot end like this.  It works in the same way when returning from a trip, especially if it has been a long journey, one of those that have deeply changed you.

You do your best to be part of a world that you no longer feel yours, but that absorbs you completely. At the beginning, it is easier but over time you figure out that there are empty gaps in you difficult to fill up, which make you feel belonging to another planet. And in those moments you try to fill those blanks with smiles and foreign gazes that are stuck in your mind. These are usually moments in which you feel a visceral attachment to the World.
As a perfect naive, you cannot accept conversations about the diversity of the human race, immigrants and emigrants, useless wars and terrorist attacks. You would like to be able to scream to everyone how damn beautiful the world is and how incredibly similar we are, despite the thousand cultural, religious or political divergences. But eventually you come back to the real-time space and you understand that the best thing you can do to feel alive is to keep travelling, exploring and learning.