Today is the end of Roshan’s grand railroad adventure. It could be said that I have accomplished very few of the things I set out to accomplish. There was very little alone time - the nature of the train and the experiences I aimed towards with both hostels and friends limited the amount of time I spent in true loneliness. And when I was properly alone, the call of the city I was in would draw me from out of the shadows of my bed and into the bustling streets of …. wherever the hell I was. I suppose even though traveling has never been something I truly loved, it has always been something I’ve done, and I guess old habits die hard.

There was very little time focused on personal success and sabbatical - the nature of time is a zero-sum game. And the nature of how I spent it, was towards others and their interests (which intermingled with mine, it’s not driven through selflessness). Given the option, I will always take time with people over time for myself, and I suppose even traveling all over the country for a couple months isn’t enough to break that behavior. I guess old habits die hard part 2.

Related - Old Habits Die Hard should be the next in the Die Hard franchise.

But in a sense I’m very okay with this. Not every trip has to have directed purpose or growth or whatever. It seems fallacious to think that this is how these kinds of experiences ought to be for no other reason than it’s romanticization in popular culture. And maybe all this was, was simply an experience. Like watching a movie, or taking drugs, or having an affair it was both pornographic and personal. An escape maybe, though that feels a little reductionist.

There was a sense of growth that I was not expecting - closure. I wouldn’t say that my previous relationship ended on aggressively bad terms, but as anyone would expect in a conversation on love it left its mark and I take a long time to recover. The destruction of the passive environment after college was debilitating, because the expression of friendship and vulnerability and my own interests was limited to the active participation of friends who no longer lived in my passive environment. While expected, the loss of the friendship of my significant other was extraordinarily painful. What was maybe unexpected was the healing process that was kicked off through this trip. We texted and had conversations and to my eyes rekindled a genuine sense of expression and investment in each other. Simultaneously I allowed myself to experiences that I had once deemed sacred for her, a destruction and deconstruction of their significance - things like dancing with someone, hooking up with someone, confiding in someone - and for the first time in about a year, I felt comfortable to move on from a space of mourning.

I don’t like to move on from something that was, in spite of it’s associated pain, beautiful. I wanted to wallow in the misery a little, and maybe play Melodrama by Lorde too often on the stereo. This was definitely an unspoken desire, to finally make peace with a death I played a role in. I just did not expect this trip to be the catalyst to fully realize it.

So in some sense, in spite of me saying that not all trips needs to have directed purpose or growth or whatever, this trip can effectively be defined by making peace with a loss of innocence. In some ways, I still experienced the things I set out to experience.

Maybe don’t use amtrak though it’s some hot trash shit did you know they tried to kick me out in Omaha Nebraska because my rail pass would end at midnight and they wanted me to buy a $300 ticket are you fucking kidding me no one even rides you amtrak