In Transit: Part 04
Somewhere Between
The coffee arrives at my table in a small café in Marrakech, and I just start crying.
Not the kind of crying you can hide behind sunglasses, but the kind that comes from somewhere deep and undeniable. The kind where you keep your head down because you are surrounded by strangers and the person sitting across from you, physically there but already gone, is the whole reason you are falling apart.
We had broken up the night before over pasta sauce. Which sounds ridiculous, but that is how it happened. He said pasta was better without marinara. I said that was just an opinion. He insisted it was fact. And somehow that tiny thing unraveled into everything. Ego, respect, the way we had stopped feeling like best friends.
Until suddenly, and unfortunately, we were done. Over.
Except we still had five days left in Morocco together. Same Airbnb. Same trip we had planned when we still believed in our future. Now he was sleeping on the couch, and I was trying not to collapse every time I looked at the space between us that had become impossible to cross.
The coffee itself was nothing special. Just coffee. But something about that moment, the quiet ritual of caffeine arriving while my whole world cracked open, made everything real. This person I had restructured my entire life around was three feet away but unreachable.
Five days later, he left early in the morning. I watched the door close and knew I would not see him again. I went to the airport alone, on my way to the next destination, and sobbed in the terminal, calling anyone who might answer, trying to feel less untethered while floating between continents with nowhere that felt like home.
That was the moment I understood that this dream had a cost I had never calculated.
When you are a digital nomad and you build your whole identity around the idea that movement means freedom and freedom means the fullest expression of being alive, you keep moving. After the breakup I went back to Portugal. The light felt golden and forgiving. I told myself I was fine and repeated it to anyone who asked. Posted the Instagram highlights. Golden hours over European cities. Wine with new friends whose faces I would forget by next month. The curated life of freedom and adventure and perpetual motion.
I was not lying. Those moments were real. They happened exactly the way I showed them. But there were all these other moments living in the gaps. The quiet evenings in another Airbnb, sitting alone and listening to unfamiliar street sounds. The exhaustion that had nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with the constant mental load of existing in temporary spaces with temporary people having temporary conversations that rarely went deeper than where are you from and how long are you here for and what is the best thing you have seen so far.
The irony was loud. I was surrounded by people all the time. Hostels full of travelers. Co-living spaces made for community. Group dinners with people who were open and easy to talk to. But I would sit at these tables and feel lonely in a way that had nothing to do with how many bodies were around me. I would nod at someone’s travel story while thinking about how we had met two days ago and probably would not see each other again, how going deeper felt impossible because deeper requires time and time was the one thing this lifestyle kept reminding me I did not have.
By the time Tokyo happened, more than a year after Morocco, the loneliness had settled into something I carried everywhere. Morocco felt like it had happened to someone else. I had built this protective coating that kept me from letting people in too much, from forming connections that felt too real. Because opening up meant acknowledging how lonely I actually was. Surrounded by people, but not by people who truly knew me. Calling it freedom. Calling it adventure. Calling it anything but what it was, which was isolation dressed up in wanderlust.
It was my birthday week. I was trying to figure out where to celebrate. Birthdays felt like a marker of another year passing. I would scroll through restaurant ideas and nothing felt special. I would research activities and everything felt fine. Just fine. Which might be the most devastating word in the English language when you are trying to celebrate the fact that you survived another trip around the sun.
My birthdays used to feel substantial. Back in the Bay Area I would throw huge parties, rent out spaces, fill them with people who had known me through different chapters of my life. Real celebration by people who understood my history and could make jokes about things that happened years ago. In Tokyo I ended up at a low-key dim sum place. It did not feel like a birthday. It felt like another meal in another country. And I could not shake the grief for the version of celebration I used to have, for community with depth and history and inside jokes that took years to build.
I refused to dismiss what I was feeling, because pretending it was nothing did not make any of it less real. This was just part of it. The part that does not make it into most digital nomad blogs. The part people leave out when they talk about taking the leap and living your best life.
There are days when I feel incredible. When I am exactly where I want to be, doing exactly what I want to do, and I cannot believe this is my actual life. And there are days when I miss deep connection and stability and the comfort of being known so intensely that it almost feels physical, like homesickness for a place that is actually people. Days when I realise that freedom and belonging do not coexist as neatly as I thought they would when I planned all of this from my apartment in LA. When I still believed you could have everything if you were unconventional enough.
Both things are true at once. And I am learning, slowly, to sit with that complexity instead of trying to make it simpler or more digestible.
That morning in Morocco when my ex left, when I heard the door close, I felt this clarity cut through the grief. I have been measuring the wrong things.
I thought the journey was about seeing the world, collecting experiences, maximising opportunities. And those things matter. But what I was actually searching for was connection and meaning and depth. The feeling of being known by people who stay long enough for the knowing to go deeper than travel stories. The feeling of knowing others that way too. Where presence becomes its own kind of home even when the location keeps changing.
That low point taught me something I had known in theory but never felt in my body. Humans are tribal creatures. We are built for connection in ways that have nothing to do with how adventurous or independent we think we are. No sunset or passport stamp rewires that truth.
The antidote to loneliness is not more movement. It is intentional connection. Especially when you are constantly moving. Especially when connection requires effort and vulnerability because you know it is temporary and that a goodbye is already on the horizon.
I am still figuring it out. But now I am doing it with my eyes open, with the understanding that connection, not freedom, is what actually grounds you when everything else is shifting.
This is the fourth post in In Transit, an ongoing look at what it means to build a life while constantly on the move. Last month, we spoke about the rush of motion and what happens in those first months after you jump. This month, we’re sitting with a different kind of truth. The part that lives in the quiet moments. The loneliness you can feel even when you’re surrounded by people. The search for connection when everything around you keeps changing.
Have you ever felt alone in a room full of people, or travelled somewhere new only to miss the feeling of being known? We’d love to hear your story. Next month, we’re diving into why belonging might be the scariest kind of freedom.
Sign up to our monthly newsletter to get the next piece sent straight to your inbox.
