Karmen Wiid

It’s a very particular feeling – getting on a plane with no one to see you off at the terminal, no one to text on your layover, no one waiting for you on the other side, on the other continent. It is a deep, dizzying freedom. One I’ve come to relish, maybe even more than the thrill of discovering a new place.

But today, sitting in a café in Delhi, drinking black coffee and watching planes gain speed and lift into the monsoon-thick sky, I find myself thinking back to a conversation I had with a friend recently. He told me he’s haunted by all the lives he’s not living. By staying in one place, he said, he’s constantly reminded of what could be… and that I must be free of that burden, living out all these small versions of lives scattered around the world.

A month here, a month there. Just long enough for dust motes to gather around the foot of the bed if I don’t sweep, long enough for the barista to learn my order, for the streets to become familiar. Long enough to form new habits, create rhythms that feel like rituals, something to make the rootlessness feel tethered.

In Bombay, I smoked only Mills’ Classics, woke up tangled in limbs and linen at noon, ate breakfast at four. It was that heady, in-between fever dream so particular to new love, when everything else feels suspended, irrelevant.

In Udaipur, I ate fruit every morning: fat papayas, mangoes that slipped from my hands, watermelon that left pools of juice at the bottom of the bowl. I let friends stitch my heart back together – rooftop by rooftop, sunset by bleeding sunset.

In Delhi, I threw myself back into work, practically moving into the café around the corner from the walk-up where I rented a room with floor-to-ceiling windows that fogged in the rain. I sat in the same corner every day until the waitresses had to tell me they were closing, gently pulling me back into the world of the living. I spent so much time there that the manager started joining me during her lunch breaks, sharing her homemade noodles reheated in the café’s back kitchen.

Later, in Hanoi, I would take up running again. Looping around Hoàn Kiếm Lake until my lungs burned and I forgot how to think. I would take myself out to dinner, spill steaming pho on my notebook as I write about longing. I would go on ambling midnight walks listening to Billie Holiday and John Coltrane, slowing when the rain starts, gaze finding the warm second story windows where lovers share a bottle of wine, mothers cook, men smoke on balconies, silhouettes outlined by the pink and green flicker of neon signs humming outside the building.

“I know that grief intimately,” I told my friend. “But maybe not in the way you think.”

All my unlived lives haunt me – precisely because I’ve tried on so many.

“It’s like trying on coats,” I said. “Each one fits perfectly. You can imagine where you’d wear it, how you’d be admired in it, how good it would feel. But then you have to hang it back on the rack and walk away.” 

You never get to keep one.

I’ve come to recognize the mourning that comes with possibility. The soulmates never met, the versions of myself never fully born, because I am constantly faced with the choice to stay or to go. Stay and see it through: the romance, the friendship, the new self. Or go, and discover another.

The thing about these fleeting, intense experiences is that, paradoxically, they accumulate grief. With every country, every person, every almost-life, I carry the ache of all the ones I’ll never have time to live.

Because the more I fall in love – with places, people, passing selves – the more I understand just how much there is out there to lose. How many homes I could make. How many lives I could build. And how few I’ll ever truly get to.

I’ve started measuring time in countries. January was Costa Rica. February and March, Nicaragua. April through June, India. Last Christmas, the Caribbean. October and November, those salsa-drenched nights in Buenos Aires. But how many months are there, really, in one human life? Not enough. Not when each place, each person, each possibility is its own full story.

An Argentinian man I once loved told me he was grateful to be a chapter in my book – but what he didn’t know is that he was his own book. They all are. Their own imagined futures, dreamt up in the short space of a month or two spent together in timeless reverie.

Because romance is never just the time spent together, is it? It’s the pasts we share, the futures we invent just to make ourselves legible to the other. A kind of time capsule of the could-have-beens. I have more of those scattered across the globe than I care to admit.

I think I fall in love easily. But then again, I’ve always suspected that about myself, even as a child. Sometimes I feel like I’ve always already known this version of me. That every chapter of my life has been a giddy, haunting reunion with her.

And yet, the grief isn’t only in the books that will remain half-written. It’s also in all the books I’ll never get around to even starting. The full, rich lives I’ll never get to live.

When I walk through a new city, I slip it on. I see how easily a life could take shape there, how my days would play out, how my world would contract and settle. As the first drops of rain hit my forehead I look up and catch a glimpse of an apartment, soft orange light spilling from the dining room windows, a narrow balcony with plants, two chairs. I can see it so clearly – how I would host friends, spill red wine on the carpet, sit on that balcony and write as the evening air swells, storm drains becoming heavier, a hand on my shoulder coaxing me inside as the food stalls pack up and the night softens. All of us moving to the safety of drier spaces.

And I ache with a beautiful sort of grief, because all I can do is smile at the thought, pull my shawl tighter around my shoulders, and keep walking.

The vision is never quite the same. The life changes with the city. In Bombay it was paint smeared hands braiding my hair. Long nights sketching cross-legged on the floor with takeout paneer butter masala cooling on the kitchen counter. In Rio de Janeiro it was mornings in the ocean, ribs bruised from long hours surfing, waking up at daybreak in that little shack in Ipanema. 

Maybe that’s the real grief of the unlived life: tasted, but never feasted on. And the more you taste, the more you suspect is out there – what you’ll never touch, never fully hold.

The feeling of having the whole world to see but wanting to linger everywhere. It’s a constant, beautiful ache.

Now I’m back on a plane, bound for Hanoi. I feel light again – deliriously free, as I always do in flight. Sometimes deeply connected to the world, other times deliciously alone in it.

Maybe the only real love affair I’ll ever fully indulge in is the one I have with deliberate lostness. This sacred unmooring.

Maybe it’s the monsoon, or maybe it’s just the bruising of another goodbye. But as I leave India, I feel especially soft.

Tender.
And yet.