I hate that I don’t believe you when you tell me that person you met while traveling is your soul mate or your person or the one you truly want to carry up the mountain for a ring ceremony with no government involvement – the kind of ceremony I think “Sitting Up In My Room” singer, Brandy had. It’s not that I think you’re lying, but I know how easy it is to fall in love when you’re away from everything familiar, away from your own bed, and away from whatever that sound is society makes with its throat, swimming through spaces that soften the edges of who you are. Traveling has this way of unfastening you. It loosens the grip of those masks you put on right after the moisturizer, the lip balm, and the smile, and nudges you to peel back the habits of self-preservation that have grown so familiar, they feel like home; presses you to unburden yourself of the walls you built so instinctively, they became the shape of your days.

You walk through a crowded night market, the air thick with the smell of grilled meat and lemongrass, your senses awakened by the unfamiliar. You smile at a stranger who’s smiling back, their accent foreign yet strangely comforting. Within hours, you’re sitting on a cracked plastic stool under a string of swaying paper lanterns, swapping stories as though you’ve known each other for years. You tell him about your brother’s wedding and the fight you had there with your mom just outside the doors at the reception and you put your hand on his knee. You cry while telling him it’s been years since you two exchanged kind words or shared a meal and he put his hand on top of yours and you don’t flinch. He tells you about the grandfather he barely remembers but wished he could and vulnerability comes easier when it’s with someone you may never see again, though you admit, out loud, that you hope to.

There’s something in knowing and leaning into the fact that we’re just passing through. In knowing we’re briefly here. It makes us so much more willing to give ourselves away in pieces – the ones we have left and the ones we’ll happily regenerate for these exact moments. It makes us willing to offer up the stories we’ve kept locked and hidden back home – the ones we convince ourselves won’t make it of the cold, dark earth we buried them in. And it feels good because they’re giving just as much of themselves. It’s that same contract we gave to the sweethearts of our elementary school days: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Stripped of the baggage of permanence, it becomes easy to believe that the person sitting across from you – the one whose laugh you’ve already imagined hearing across a kitchen during housewarming while she’s meeting and talking to your fraternity brother’s wife for the first time – could be the one who finally sees you. The real you. The you that you’re not even sure you can bring back to life most days.

Back home, everything feels heavier, burdened by consequence. There’s that guy you see every morning headed to work on the D train, the one you’ve thought about saying hello to when you’re both staring a little too long, but never do because you’ve convinced yourself it’s not the right time. Or that woman who lives a few floors below, the one you’ve been crushing on for months but avoid because you “don’t like to shit where you eat.” The same fears that feel insurmountable at home dissolve when you’re somewhere new, when you’re walking through a city that isn’t yours, carrying nothing but a canvas crossbody bag and the hope that today might surprise you.

So you fall fast. You fall hard. You find yourself calling your friends within hours of saying goodbye to them on that first night, breathless and rambling: “We stayed up all night talking and sharing so much of ourselves,” and “I told him things I’ve never told anyone.” Most of your friends cheer you on because they’ve been there, too – or want to be there so badly it gives them goosebumps. One had this experience in Jamaica one winter when she tried being a snowbird. One fell hard in Ghana and promised the beautiful Ghanaian he’d be back for her when his job gave him more days off. But the smart ones, the grounded ones, say things like, “You could have done that with the guy you met at the bagel shop that one time, but you were insistent on taking it slow when he was trying to open up to you on the first date.”

They’re right, of course. But it’s not about taking it slow or being cautious. It’s about the way travel collapses time, the way it makes a single evening feel like a lifetime or at least a really good summer – the kind where it only rains on Sunday nights, your barber is never busy when you need him, and everyone survives those nine hour brunches. It’s about the magic – no, not magic, something deeper, something untamed and reckless – of finding someone who, for a brief, fleeting moment, feels like your bed, that spot at your kitchen island where you eat your avocado toast on mornings when you’re not late for work, and like that sweater you bought, hoping to wear it one winter by a fire pit. They feel like home when everything else is unfamiliar.

I get it, though. I really do. And maybe your soul mate, your person, the one you want to carry up the mountain is out there, halfway across the world, waiting for you to find them. Or maybe they’re closer than you think, standing behind you in line at the bagel shop, wanting to tell you everything they possibly can about them on the first date, hoping you choose to stay and do the same.