another travelling song

i am a traveller. i know it. it’s in me in a way that i can’t explain, like you can’t explain why your favourite colour is green or you love the smell of the sea, or how you just know you’re going to be a fireman when you grow up. in that inexplicable, and sometimes seemingly irrational way, i know i'm meant to travel.

i’ve always grown up with strange people around me (strange as in foreign – although most of them were strange as in weird too). our house seems to be a haven for foreign friends, and foreign friends-of-friends, and friends of those friends who heard somewhere that we’d take them in if they showed up on our doorstep. and i’ve loved it. i’ve loved having these people who are so other, and sometimes complete strangers, and i’ve loved connecting with them in different ways and showing them my home – seeing it through their eyes. and, invariably, whenever one of the many travellers leaves, they leave with open invitations to stay in beds and on couches in their corner of the world. and it’s wonderful. it’s how a community should be. but i’m beginning to realise that while it’s fantastic to have all these people constantly passing through, it makes me feel more and more like i’m being left behind. because some of them you really connect with. and you want to be in their lives always, not just as a fleeting memory of a holiday in africa. but more than that, i feel that every time another visitor leaves, they take a small piece of me with them. and i feel like i’m being left here, getting smaller and smaller, while the world gets bigger and more impatient for me to see it all. to go find all the pieces of me and put them back together. and i so want to see it all. more every day. i want to see it now. because while i’m stuck here in a routine i don’t want, the world is happening. and it’s exciting. and even though some of it may be there forever, i don’t feel like it can wait. because i am a traveller. and i need to travel.