I underestimated this. I forgot. What it does to you when you spend the whole day on the highway under a grey sky surrounded by mainly flat land, factories, electricity poles, smoking chimneys. When your neighbours play their music too loud and shout in their phones. When every three hours there is a break and you find yourself outside a gas station, a macdonalds, a giant parkinglot, human trash everywhere. Changing busses and moving through crowds of unhappy people, drunken students, concrete buildings. Getting back on another bus, moving back into a speed that isn´t your natural speed.
They say that once you get in a car, a train, an airplane, once you start to travel in a speed that isn´t your natural speed, your soul is left behind. I know an artist who made an app based on that, it shows you where your soul is and lets you know when it has caught up with you. The soul travels day and night with a speed of 5 kilometers per hour, it doesn´t need a pauze, no sleep, no diner breaks. All it does is move to be united with your body as quick as possible.
My soul is far away. I can feel the hole, the empty space. I left it in a peaceful place where for three days I worked in the garden, baked bread, collected wild greens, woke up with the sun, ate the meat of the sheep that had kept the grass short not so long ago. Where I checked out the hand built cabins, the rocket stove bathtub, the washing machine that is powered by a bike and even though it doesn´t work well is a nice experiment for a future better version. The dry toilets. the arched walls of the old house, the water cachments, the chicken coop. Where my friend showed me the big piece of land they were about to buy while planting seeds inbetween the bushes and trees. Where I jumped in big piles of leaves with a small boy after he showed me the city he had build out of sand. Where at night I looked at the stars and in the morning I woke up before the sun, the sky turning pink over the mountains. Days were short there but they seemed to last forever. I couldn´t but smile.
I left my soul and I could have known it but "could have" are words I don´t want to use anymore. You take decisions and not until you are in the middle of it, you really know what you got yourself into. And maybe it is a good thing. To feel how painful it is when you don´t fit in the world that surrounds you. When you move too fast. When you do things you don´t really want to do.
I smiled only a few times. Twice when we made a toilet stop along on a small parking space without a restaurant, a toilet building only. The womens toilets were dirty and only one of the three had a door. The women were appaled and all lined up in front of the one with a door. I walked outside and chose a nice bush to hide behind.
I wasn´t wearing a coat and when I walked back a girl asked me if I wasn´t cold. I was but it didn´t bother me. "I am used to it,¨I said and smiled again, thinking about the two weeks coming up when I will sleep outside again, when my feet will lead the way.
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