steam curls from coffee
a bird drifts across the sky
nowhere feels the same
The furthest I’ve ever traveled from home was Japan. Not simply in terms of miles, though the numbers themselves were vast, stretching across oceans and continents, but in the way the air itself seemed to belong to another dimension.
I remember stepping out of Narita Airport for the first time. The heat clung to my skin, humid and thick, the air tinged with something metallic, as if electricity had been dissolved into it. Taxis lined up with precision, drivers in white gloves, engines idling softly. Back home, nothing lined up so neatly. It was in that small detail—a row of taxis obedient to an unseen order—that I first realized I had entered another system entirely.
The city unfolded around me like a dream both familiar and alien. Neon signs glowed in languages I couldn’t read. They weren’t just advertisements; they were constellations in a new sky. I ate noodles in shops so narrow it felt as if they had been designed for a single person. I sat in a jazz bar where the bartender polished glasses as though preparing them for a ritual. I wandered through arcades where men in suits played video games at midnight, their faces illuminated by the glow of machines.
It didn’t feel like tourism. It felt like being slowly rewritten.
The language barrier should have silenced me, yet it didn’t. Gestures carried weight. A bow, a smile, the pause before speaking—these became their own vocabulary. And in that silence, I discovered something unexpected: sometimes you understand more when you cannot speak. Words get in the way. Without them, the world arrives sharper.
On the train from Tokyo to Kyoto, I stared through the window for hours. Mountains appeared and dissolved. Villages flashed by in fragments: laundry drying on balconies, bicycles parked neatly under staircases, vending machines glowing in the dusk. Each glimpse felt complete, as if every passing moment was a self-contained story I would never read again. I thought: perhaps the furthest we ever travel is not measured in geography, but in how much of ourselves we leave behind in each of these unfinished scenes.
One night in Kyoto, I walked along the Kamo River at two in the morning. The streets were empty except for the river’s steady voice. Lanterns flickered on the banks, their light trembling on the water. A man stood fishing in the dark. For what, I couldn’t say. He didn’t look at me. I didn’t look at him. We occupied parallel worlds for a few minutes, silent and unconnected, and yet I felt something pass between us. A recognition. A reminder that even on the far side of the world, loneliness is not unique.
In that moment, I felt both utterly alone and profoundly connected. The paradox tightened my chest, and tears threatened, though I blamed the wind.
The furthest I’ve ever traveled from home is not a line on a map. It is the distance between who I was when I boarded the plane and who I was when I returned.
In Fukuoka, I once walked through a rainstorm that soaked me completely. My shoes filled with water, my notebook blurred into unreadable ink. I should have been miserable. But I wasn’t. I laughed out loud, alone in the street, because I realized no one knew me there. I could vanish into that city and the world would continue unchanged. There was freedom in that thought, a fragile joy in realizing how small I was.
In Nagasaki, I stood on a hillside overlooking the port. Ships moved in silence. The city stretched below, its history heavy but invisible in the everyday lives unfolding there. I thought of the notebooks I had filled back home—pages of weather reports, fragments of hope, lessons half learned. Standing there, I understood that each place carries its own invisible notebooks, filled with lives that had nothing to do with mine, yet somehow echoed against my own.
Coming home was stranger than leaving. After weeks of trains, temples, rain, and silence, I stepped back into my apartment. Everything was as I had left it: the shoes by the door, the unwashed dishes, the plant leaning toward the window. And yet I was not the same.
The distance had settled inside me.
The furthest I had traveled was not measured by oceans crossed or cities named. It was measured in how my mind had been dismantled and rearranged by the simple act of being elsewhere. The taxis lined up in Tokyo, the hum of the air conditioner in Shinjuku, the soup in Kyoto, the rain in Fukuoka, the silence of a fisherman by the river—all of it had entered me. And once inside, it refused to leave.
When I think about it now, I realize distance is a trick. You can go twelve time zones away and still carry the same heaviness, the same restless noise, the same loneliness. Or you can walk five minutes from your home, sit on a bench, and suddenly feel as if you’ve crossed into another universe.
The furthest I have traveled from home is not a point I can mark on a map. It is the quiet dismantling of the idea that home is fixed.
Because if you pay attention, home is not a place you return to. It is something you build wherever your body and mind finally agree to rest.
life 