seattle.

I took my first solo trip in what was my first in five years, and for someone who has spent a majority of their life living from suitcase to hotel room for months on end, is something somewhat of an overdue moment. Perhaps it’s because of lived experience that I find myself hesitating on pushing the go-ahead on trips now. The fact that while I find myself in my most authentic state travelling, I have that nagging voice of parentals who have grown up without, and who feel as if money spent on vacation and travel could be money saved elsewhere.

Yet Seattle was a dream, and a reminder that travel is an investment in myself, a way that I can reconnect to the spaces that I have outgrown. A reminder that half the discovery is in the journey and not the destination. I have lost track of how many times I have reminisced and found myself in various spaces on this trip; my first trip back to Asia after moving to Canada, the morning bustle of wet markets that recall my time both in Malaysia and the Netherlands, fried fish that remind me of Kibbeling from my childhood, and oddly enough, Hong Kong, and Chengdu through a bowl of gently tossed dandanmian.

Whenever I find myself leaving North America, it will likely be for a place that makes the world a little more accessible. I am nowhere near as well travelled as I want to be, and feel like I need to make up for lost time in the years of the pandemic and prior, but I take courage knowing that this will be the first of many that I will implore myself to take. I have already my eyes set on a trip to London to visit a close friend and partner before they leave off on their next adventure. It will be a coming home in many respects, a city that has seen me in my childhood and adolescence. The one city in the world I am terrified to return to, as for me, all roads lead through London.

I write this now as I find myself home in Asia, back in a city and space that is more strange than familiar, another city for another time, another space of untold story.