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There's nothing quite like your last day in a hostel. Not the last day before you move to another hostel in some other city, but the last day in a hostel of your trip. Game’s over, you have to head home. It always seems to work out that you meet the most people and the coolest people then – they’ve only just arrived and you're already packing your bags. You’ve got a long trip and the even more arduous slipping back into monotony ahead, while they get to spend the next week drinking sangria on the roof. It’s quite tempting to simply miss your flight, pick up a job at a local hostel washing sheets and to continue to live the dream. Which would be the quickest way to kill the vibe. The fact that everything is so spontaneous is what makes the whole experience seem magical. To introduce routine would just be blasphemy. And it’s interesting to note that all of my stays in various hostels throughout Europe kind of blend into one profound experience in the end.

In my conversation with a fellow Aussie traveler today, we observed that the only people who will actually listen to your travel stories are your fellow travelers. The people at home tend to glaze over when you start recounting adventures from the road.

So if you can’t talk in detail about your travels unless you’re actually traveling, it makes a good case for the phenomenon that traveling is really existence on another plane. Backpacking, to be more specific. Nowhere else in the world can you meet such a disparate group of people all united for the same purpose. Nowhere else can you break the barriers of social limits enough to chat up everyone who walks by you after you’ve had a few glasses of sangria.

The thing is, the beauty of it all, you can feel sorrow for leaving just as you’ve met some nice people. But the truth is that you can repeat the same feeling of kinship by association at any hostel in any city of the world on any given day. It’s an endless parade of interim friends just waiting for you to strike up a conversation. Always the same few introductory questions – where are you from, where have you been, how long have you been here, where are you going next? All associated with your travel. It’s not what do you do or who are your parents or who are you dating. It’s tell me where you’ve been – and tell me about it. Is it somewhere I’d want to go? Should I go there tomorrow?

And it takes all kinds – people who’ve quit their jobs to travel, people who travel because they’ve quit their jobs. 18 year old students, 25 year old girls moving away from home and looking for a job and an apartment, 60 year old retirees. Couples. Groups of friends. Solo travelers. People who just don’t have a normal existence. They live by a different set of rules. Going to any decent hostel at one point feels like coming home. Right, climb up to the top bunk in the dark because everyone is sleeping in the room. Wake up just early enough to not miss the free breakfast. It’s nirvana. It’s bohemian. And you never want it to end, but it’s able to exist solely because it has to at some point.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Europe and new music. It's like a whole new world. At the end of it all, it's about experiencing new places; putting on new hats. Raindrops in Prague falling on my cheek as I look up to see a flying angel atop a Renaissance building. The sky moves faster here. More chances to see the sun peeking through a grey cloud. Some of the hats don't fit. Some of them do, but I don't like the way they feel.

Sometimes it's better to drink alone than with someone who doesn't hear the notes to a song quite the same way you do. Sometimes all you need is a few candles burning into the London night. Sometimes you need to escape to realize that all you want to do is go back. Sometimes escape is everything you needed to realize that going back would be the worst thing you could do. And sometimes escape plants you firmly in the middle of these two desires, and merely serves as escape with the false promise of perspective.

I know that I'm the only person in my world who I can depend on, but that to do so unequivocally would mean my destruction. Sometimes you need to depend on the unreliable, you need to trust those who don't deserve it. Sometimes you need to revel in the utter blackness of desolation - just to appreciate rising up again into the glare of the sunlight.

Sometimes you need a pilgrimage.

You can only enjoy the tapping and running of raindrops on a windowpane if you've been stuck outside in their downpour.

There are loves lost. There are loves found and then found to be false. And then there are loves that have merely been skirted. And these are the ones that stay with us in the dark. It is the promise of things not yet indulged, the temptation of love lost. Compare it to the sun shining behind a tree branch; it highlights that which is beautiful but also shadows that very object. Forever to remain an outline of shadow behind the light. Love is both shadow and light. But in this image neither rein.

It is a song that speaks to your soul on a train that shuttles past an endless montage of graffiti. It is the sun that teases to burn through the window at full force during this voyage but that is forever trapped behind the shadows of endless tunnels. It is the empty wine glass and the drip-drip-drip of the empty wine bottle at the end of the night. It is the mist that clings to the fire of a lamp post, creating a crescent of light onto a picture taken in the hopes of capturing the essence of a desolate street corner - trespass by a muse.

It is the opening of a new bottle even though you know it isn't necessary. It is reading a novel that is written in the very language of your soul, and reading it in a cafe in Old Town Prague while you sit beside someone who has no idea what the novel is about, someone who has no desire to listen to the subtleties enough to find out.

It is looking up at the unfamiliar star-scape and contemplating the thousands of miles of distance that create such a small disparity in the constellations. To be lost in a century when these differences meant more than simply boarding a plane and going home to the comfort of a familiar canopy of stars.

It is weighing the heavy against the light, desire against infatuation, life against living.