“I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said, her voice a warm thread in the crisp silence, stirring her tea with a spoon that looked like it belonged to another time. “What countries do you still want to visit?”
We were sitting on a stone bench behind the small station in Samedan. Early spring still held the Alps in its teeth. The train had gone, the square was quiet, and the clouds hovered like indecisive thoughts just above the peaks. Her scarf was wrapped twice around her neck, its ends trailing like punctuation marks for something unsaid.
I could have said Iceland. I could have said Mongolia. Or Madagascar. But instead, I looked at her for a moment, then down at the gravel by my boots, and said, “I don’t really think in countries anymore.”
She raised her eyebrows in the way she did when I said something either poetic or evasive. “You’ve stopped believing in stamps?”
“Maybe. Or maybe I just started noticing what it was I was really searching for.”
She didn’t respond. Just tilted her head slightly and waited. That was her gift. Letting silence do the work without ever making it feel awkward.
I took a sip of my tea. Lukewarm already.
“There’s a version of me I met in Japan,” I began. “Somewhere north. In a ryokan near the edge of Tohoku, not far from Ichinoseki. It had snowed that morning, enough to soften the outlines of everything. I didn’t check my phone that day. Didn’t have to. There was no signal. No notifications. Just a kettle, a view of bare trees, and a futon on the floor. I folded my clothes carefully and sat still for longer than I usually let myself. That place? That was the country of Patience. And I didn’t even know I’d arrived until I left.”
She exhaled softly, the way one does after opening a window into someone else’s memory.
“I think I went there once,” she said, almost to herself.
“Where?”
“Not Japan,” she clarified. “But that country you just named. Patience. I was nineteen. I had just broken up with someone I thought I would marry. I spent three weeks alone in a cabin near Lake Bled. There was no heating except a wood stove. I had to chop wood every day just to stay warm. I thought I was being punished. But now I think… maybe I was just learning how to sit still. How to not run away.”
We were both quiet then.
The mountain shadow moved a little further across the square.
“There’s another country,” I said after a while. “One I visited in Coimbra. In Portugal. It was hot. I was reading a book on a cracked balcony while old men argued below about football and something that sounded like politics but could’ve just been about fishing. I realized then how much of life is background noise. And how little of it needs translating. That country? I call it Enough.”
“That’s a rare one,” she nodded. “Harder to find than any capital city.”
“And then there’s the place where grief doesn’t ask to be solved. Where you just carry it, like a stone in your pocket. Not heavy. Just there.”
She reached for her tea again. The spoon had stopped spinning. “What’s that place called?”
“Still working on the name,” I said. “But I think it’s somewhere in Slovenia. Maybe a bus stop between towns. Maybe in the guestbook of a hostel where someone wrote a message to someone who’d never read it.”
The sun slipped behind a cloud. Her face lost its golden edge.
She said, “I think I’ve only ever lived in the country of Trying.”
“That’s not a bad place.”
“No. But it’s exhausting. The currency there is effort. And it depreciates quickly.”
We both smiled. Then she added, more serious now, “Sometimes I want to leave. But I don’t know how.”
I looked at her. Really looked.
“Maybe,” I said slowly, “you don’t have to leave. Just stop asking it to be more than it is.”
She turned toward the mountains. There was something in her expression that reminded me of driftwood. Weathered, but not ruined.
The train would come again. But not yet.
That evening, back at the guesthouse, I thought about her question again. What countries do I want to visit?
I thought about a man I met in a ramen shop in Takeo, Kyushu. He was sixty-something, waiting for a diagnosis. Stage four. He spoke English haltingly, but with the rhythm of someone who had learned it from songs, not textbooks. He had four grandchildren and a dog he adored. He said the best ramen is the one where the onions make you cry. He didn’t mean from spice.
That country? I call it Surrender. He lived there. I only passed through.
I thought about a night spent in Ljubljana, walking alone through Šiška after a failed attempt at conversation. I remember standing in front of a vending machine, not knowing what to choose, not caring. A boy on a skateboard passed by and nodded at me like I mattered.
That country? Belonging.
I want to go back.
And there’s the country I visit in dreams. The one where I’m not trying to fix myself. Just being. Drinking lukewarm coffee on the veranda of a house I’ll never afford. My grandparents are still alive there. My sister is always laughing. The birds never leave.
It smells like basil and rain.
No capital. No flag. No anthem.
But it’s home.
Wabi-Sabi Lesson from the Borderless Map
The places that shape us are rarely on maps. They live in glances, in gestures, in the tea that goes cold before you finish it.
Not all journeys ask for passports. Some just ask for presence.
So next time someone asks where you want to go, maybe tell them about the country of Enough. Or the country of Letting Go. Or Stillness. Or Belonging.
And if they look confused, just smile.
They’ll get there.
Eventually.
life 