Sometimes I wonder whether I am truly the writer that travels or the traveler that writes. Each journey rearranges the furniture of my mind, and when I return to the page, I hardly recognize the person holding the pen. Maybe the road is just another kind of sentence—open-ended, full of commas and detours—waiting for me to discover where it finally wants to end. All I know is that somehow they feed off each other, making me appreciate them even more than I did before.
I have come to accept the road and appreciate it through the privacy of my notebook. I have learned to close my eyes and go back to that place, to that time, to the sun in my face and the fields of gold. From the historic sights of Rome to the cork fields of Portugal, my eyes have seen interminable beauty, and my pen still continues to try to emulate it.
Each place leaves a slight fingerprint on me—an accent that lingers in my thoughts, a borrowed gesture, a new way of measuring what matters. Over time, I start to recognize myself less by where I come from and more by the moments that have unsettled and remade me: a conversation on a night train, a sudden storm over an unfamiliar sea, a street whose name I never learned but whose smell I can still recall. Travel doesn’t hand me a new identity all at once; it erodes and redraws the old one, grain by grain, until one day I realize that the person stepping off the bus is someone I have slowly become along the way.
Sometimes the words come to me like distant cities—blurred at the edges, more feeling than map. I chase them the way I chase trains, half-afraid I’ll miss the one that was meant for me. Yet with every departure, I learn to trust that another story will arrive, carrying a version of me I haven’t met yet. Maybe that’s all I’m really doing out here: circling the globe in search of the sentence that finally feels like home. And who knows? Maybe the next place might become my greatest story yet.
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