Kimberlee K.

If Day 7 was weird to wake up to, Day 8 was worse. Since Natalee and I didn’t fly out until 12:30, we were able to take our time getting ready. That morning, I woke up with my focus primarily on making sure everything was in place for our trip home. I collected my things, double, triple, quadruple checking I had my passport, and I wrapped my souvenirs tightly in the hope that none of them would break on the way home.

While I was packing my suitcase, I came to find that the only way I was going to get it to shut was if I reorganized the entire thing. When I left, everything had fit perfectly, neatly. I’d organized it down to the inch. But as I looked at it now, it was kind of a disaster. So, I sat down in the middle of the floor, removed everything one by one and put them in piles around me. And even though I grew frustrated at first, trying and failing and then trying again to making everything fit, I started to realize that I simply had to approach it differently than I had at home. Because like me, my suitcase was different than it was when I started. With each city it had collected little things, memories, pictures, souvenirs, and they changed its shape, changed how it fit together. And so as I again began to make sense of everything, I began to appreciate these differences and I was thankful for them, because I knew that when I got back home and unpacked everything, I’d still have those new pieces I’d collected here and they would stay with me. Further down the road, when the trip becomes more of a distant memory, I know I’ll come across these pieces, in perhaps the most unexpected of ways and I’ll remember how they changed me, how they helped me grow and I’ll be able to look back at them and smile.

Once I fit the last few things inside my suitcase and zipped it shut, Natalee and I did one last look around our room.

“Is that everything?” I asked, and she nodded, opening up the door for us to roll our suitcases out the door and down the hall.

When we got downstairs, we handed the attendant our room keys and asked him to call us a taxi to the airport. Once the taxi arrived, we quickly walked outside, loaded our bags and got in, the initial action of which seemed like it had only just happened, as if this taxi driver should be that same man who talked football with us only a short time ago.

As he drove, I looked around at all the cars driving past. Some were taxis, perhaps shuttling tourists like us, some were families going somewhere on a Wednesday morning, and some were singles or couples, talking or laughing or sitting silently. In all the driving I’d done for work, I’d seen all these combinations before, and now here I was on the opposite end of the world seeing their mirror image. It made me realize how many worlds there are in our world. How many lives are all happening at the very same time, most of which we’ll never know about. But as the taxi driver continued down the highway to the airport, I realized how many lives I’d gotten to be a part of over the last week. Both those in our group, and those of people I’d met in restaurants and gift shops and pubs. We’d all shared something, even if it was brief. And I think that’s one of the greatest things about traveling. For no matter where you go, you’re going to find worlds upon worlds spinning and lives upon lives being lived, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get to be part of them, if only for a moment.