I wish to travel, but at the same time I am afraid of traveling at this very moment

By Massimo Usai

(ITALIAN VERSION HERE)

I wake up without warning and go around the house.

It may be 5:00 in the morning, but I don’t want to check the alarm clock.

I keep wandering from the kitchen to the couch, travelling inside the house.

I look absent-mindedly at the book I left open last night before I got to sleep.

I notice that I stopped when the protagonist goes to the airport to catch a plane to Japan for an amazing travel to Asia.

I think about the trips I can’t make, I believe that traveling now is a big wish, but I don’t want to travel to a deserted airport.

I loved being two hours waiting for my flight, alone, watching people go through my gaze.

I imagined their stories, where they went, and what they were going to do.

Who came home, who secretly went to visit the “virtual” lover known on the internet.

Some went to Frankfurt for work and would return the same evening to the city, who had pillows and other useful contraption for a long trip to New Zealand.

There were moms with kids asking for a thousand things and those with babies who needed their breasts to eat.

Those grandmothers who went to visit their grandchildren in Holland and those grandmothers who return home after seeing their children and grandchildren in the city.

Tourists looked at the photos on the newly made mobile phone on the all-inclusive 72-hour tour of my town.

Those people in short breeches going to the south of Spain or those people, already drunk, who was going to Bucharest to celebrate the end of celibacy for their best friend.

There was the one with the headphones who was definitely listening to indie music.

You understood it from how they were dressed and the girls with the sexy glasses who read a decidedly exciting book about life.

I think of this human jungle.

I believe traveling today, through deserted airports, without refreshment services, where you have to keep your distance when you sit down, is not my favorite cup of tea to have a perfect trip.

I don’t check the time, not yet.

I’m having coffee, and I’m going to eat a buttery cookie that I made a few days earlier and look out the window.

The lights of dawn are still a long way off, so I put plaid on me, turn my head in the dark corner of the sofa and go back to sleep, knowing that tomorrow morning I will have pain in my bones.

Photo Cover: Rome, Italy by @massimousai

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