A Guide to a Lonely Journey

In my opinion, every person should leave at least formerly without companions. You save on choosing a seat when checking in online there's no person on the aeroplane with whom you want to sit next to each other. rather of evening exchanges, when it gets dark, you weigh and sort yourself out. You estimate from a distance of a thousand kilometers of your musketeers- how important they do for you, how important fun you have with them and whether you miss someone further than others.

At the same time, you understand whether you are able to spend a week with yourself or whether you do not really need yourself.

I like to go nearly alone, so that for numerous kilometers around no one knows me( it's kind of part of that dream where I drop a return ticket in the dust, get out of my own life, and vanish among the hills). I love it when I do not know anyone. I hope my short funny peregrinations will gradationally turn into long and dangerous ones . I also hope that I'll not be strangled on the way.

Traveling with someone is disgusting

No, other people can certainly come in handy on a trip. With them, it is cheaper: one Aeroexpress ticket costs 500 rubles, and two – already 850. Double rooms are chipier, a bottle of wine is easier to drink together. In addition, traveling with a companion is socially acceptable. Booking in the default settings believes that "two adults" will go.

From traveling with a friend, you bring full-length photos: take pictures of me standing on a pier, peering into the sea, as if I were the mistress of a French lieutenant, and he, a cattleman, is trying to catch up with the horizon.

Your troubles become the troubles of your companions. If you rub your leg, they'll give you a band-aid and listen to the whining. Sometimes you just love them and want to go with them. Happens. There is nothing to be ashamed of here.

But traveling with someone is, for the most part, disgusting.

Suffering begins with the plan of the trip. The law of the donkey and the rope is included: if someone drags, the rest slow down. Oh, that moment when you put your fingers over the keyboard to buy half a dozen tickets and hotels, and your accomplices start: "I'm not sure, oh, I'll only have money in a week, and I'm registered with a doctor. And let's fly to Ireland via Iceland and have a connection of twenty minutes. There is no hairdryer in the room. There is no full-length mirror in the room, only up to the knees. There are no silk linens in the room with small scarlet tassels in the corners."

Oh, the unbearable torment of other people's desires! Oh, plans that immediately fall apart! I want to take an electric gun for livestock and drive those lazy asses towards the adventure.

People with whom you still managed to agree and go together will certainly be late. And get lost. Then they will burn in the sun. They will be bitten by a cow. You will jointly decide when to wake up, choose whether to go to the mountains or the beach, buy wines or tequila, go to bed early or go for a walk. Even devouring without a meeting will not work - if you planned to save money, your companion will want to go to a fish restaurant.

Traveling together is a team effort. Translated: everyone sells out, goes over budget, wastes hours and blames each other.

Oh yeah, their troubles become yours. A friend will rub his leg and take your last patch. Maybe it will rip off your bloody heel. Then he'll whine.

And all this in order to meet with glances and glances over the waterfall to say to each other "We are experiencing this together!"

Go alone, really. Go even without me.

Loneliness Diary

Solo travel is an apocalypse emulator, a training of life in a world where everyone has disappeared, but there is still a queue in the museum.

Before each trip, I suffer for a long time. What if I get lost? How to swim in the sea, where to put things? Who will take a picture of me? Will I have fun? Will I be able to get drunk if no one will insure me? Haven't I forgotten how to speak English?

Then I remember that's not what I'm suffering about.

Before the trip, it is worth training to exist without others: walk more alone; in the evenings, procrastinate and idle for half an hour in an empty room, listening to yourself; turn off messenger notifications.

The first day alone. Okay, the first day to be alone is incredibly difficult. Airport, hotel, put things out - I love to check in a hotel room so that in ten minutes I do not leave a drop of myself in it.

So I go out to a foreign city, buy a map and start the journey. I watch, listen, try to understand how traffic lights work here, pave the first road to the place that will be my home for a week. Ropes with washed laundry are stretched through the narrow alleys, cyclists swear in an unfamiliar language, I am so surprised ... I open my mouth to share, and there is no one around. They stayed at the beginning of the road. Everyone doesn't care about me, what a longing.

Until the first lonely journey, I did not remember that speech is a gift, that the throat, if not used, closes and does not allow to say a word, and the owners of the taverns do not care about me.

The first day of a lonely journey you plunge deep into yourself. Everything that's there, you devilishly don't like. All the time you rub your palm temple: angels, beasts and people come to the brain, whom you have not seen for decades, everyone wants something. You talk aloud with sparrows, cats, foam on the river.

You ask yourself, "What am I doing here?" and "And you couldn't see yourself at home?" I mean, you lose narcissism.

You are skinned by a man who has taken a comfort zone all his life – people who know you.

The second day alone. The next day I learn to choose. Simply put, I do myself. I decide, for example, to find a small café and have breakfast there every day. Say hello to the owner. Tell him a local word and watch him laugh. To be remembered there and therefore to be there.

Then I pull myself up: hey, you can have cakes for breakfast. Or vodka. Or snatching loaves from tourists and running away. And I'm trying to build myself a routine again. I'm bored. Let's go, we're going to gnaw on this city with our teeth.

The third and fourth days alone. For another day or two, you stupidly learn solitude. Through minor troubles and casual acquaintances, through attempts to turn the paper map exactly as you are now standing. You make plans, you change. You order delicious, you are happy.

You finally learn not to discuss everything with anyone. When the mind works only for reception, not for transmission, you feel smells better, you see the color of the shadow. In the strange sun and in sneakers, in the glow of gold and greenery, jostling in the fish market and asking "Do I like it? And this?", you slowly rise to the apogee of yourself.

Fifth day alone. Sometime on the fifth day, or rather, on the fifth evening, a lonely traveler suddenly becomes completely happy.

Complete loneliness is an incredible physical pleasure, but its very nature is such that it cannot be shared.

Maybe you'll find out you can't be alone. It's not yours. Like poker or pickles. According to statistics, 34% of those who have been on a solo trip would like to repeat it. The other 66% apparently swear to themselves "Never again." That happens, too.

High and confused: how to prepare for a solo trip

A few lyrical tips to make it easier for yourself to go into solitude, from a person who is carrying his own backpack.

1. Stay in hostels. Even a fan of personal space on a solo trip sometimes feels like he's been swamped with personal space. In the hostel there is always someone to chat with, while the interlocutor will no longer be met.
2. Love Wi-Fi! When it is very difficult, you drop into instant messengers, throw all the messages and photos and disconnect. High.
3. Take the key with you. If you're a snob like me, all those "clear waterproof bags that cling to your swimming trunks to store things" should be terribly infuriating. On the beach, take the keys to the temporary dwelling and a couple of bills for ice cream. Or go to the paid beach and dig closer to the lifeguards.
4. Carry a notebook with you. A couple of lines in notepad instead of dialogue helps relieve tension. Yeah, but it's healing. Again, it will be easier to tell friends later, you will not forget anything.
5. Allow yourself. Don't want to leave the room? Pulls to go to bed at nine? Arrived in a country with the best cuisine in the world, and the appetite was shaken? Reluctance to go to the museum, and the hunt to visit the city dump? For God's sake.
6. Don't try to get drunk. It is not a fact that it will work, and if it does, it will be very stupid.

Of course, you can not hide from yourself, so a lonely trip is the best time to self-study and establish contact with yourself.

And you can and should leave other people: how else will you understand that you love them and want to see them? How do you remember why you chose them?

Sometimes, you sit on the hot asphalt by the highway and remember how well your friend smiles – and you smile too.