On the annual occasion when some kindly, unfortunate soul asks me about my travels, I am often posed two questions I find difficult to answer: “Why should I go to Belgium?” and “Do you prefer to travel alone, or with other people?”
The loneliness of solo travel does exist, although not in the way you might think. It doesn’t come from the vast emptiness of a queen-sized bed, or from waiting ten hours for a bus in some humid nowhere. The first is alleviated by a cup of tea and a hot breakfast in the town plaza, the second by a pack of cigarettes and a mind, like mine, that consists of a howling, endlessly entertaining tornado of bric-a-brac and half-forgotten song lyrics.
The actual lonely part happens when you come across a scene, a view, a thing, a person, so surprising that it makes you briefly question reality. You want someone to reassure you that you haven’t imagined it. In that moment, all you want – and all you don’t have – is someone that you can look across to and say “did you just see that?”
In other words, sometimes you need someone to arrest your slide into solipsism, because there is nothing lonelier than a god.
Annet understood this from the moment we met, on an appropriately bizarre walking tour of Wroclaw’s dwarves. We were each other’s lifeline in this sea of weirdness, cracking jokes and clowning around while the tour de kitsch veered between po-faced gravity and rehearsed corporate Fun. This little slip of a German, blonde and twinkly-blue eyed, was the perfect companion, the perfect partner in crime. Not just because we could cackle away together at the back of the class, but because she understood exactly, just as I did, how utterly absurd it was that we had both willingly signed up to it in the first place.
The tour group melted away, and over the next two evenings we cast our net far and wide over the city, hungry for more, knowing full well that we needed to share all the moments we could in the limited time we had left with each other.
We drank at a bar that sold only shots of Dubrowka and lard on toast, we argued about art with a man who did portraits on the street, we chased each other around supermarket aisles and stood shivering in the refrigerated section, planning picnics that we knew would never happen. We discovered a mutual love of jazz and found a club in the old town where they were playing live bebop. We were the only ones who danced, and when we tired of that we sat at our table and I whispered to her made up stories that the horns sketched out in real time.
Before I walked her back to her hostel on the second and last night, we spent a quiet hour together in an empty bar with a half-arsed Hawaiian theme. I looked at her and she looked at me and I think we both knew that this was as far as it would go. For 48 hours we had not only managed to confront reality, but to change it, twin gods in a universe of our own creation. The next step would be so utterly human that it would just bring the walls of our dream down, remind us that we were, in fact, not the deities we thought we were.
As I hugged her goodbye outside her hostel, I marvelled at how such a fragile-seeming thing could hold such power. Then I walked away, still a god, lonely again.
