I woke up from how cold I was. Three hours had passed, at most. Sveta was still breathing in the same rhythm. A cold fog shrouded our shelter. The dampness lowered the temperature.
– It’s cold. We better go, – I said in a calm tone of voice.
– Yes. It’s really freezing. Let’s go.
I quickly folded and packed everything. After a five-minute walk, the hypothermia was completely gone. The dark path went uphill and seemed to streak straight into the starry sky. In all that time, only two cars whizzed past us. We raised our arms wrapped in reflective tape, but no success.
It was half past three in the morning.
As we walked along the curvy road, up and down the hills, I felt energised and pleasantly relaxed by the rhythmic pacing and the thoughts that were spinning around in my slightly rested mind. How awesome it was there! How special! How long I had waited for that! How much I had to endure and go through to drive myself into that dark, cold, but very kind, quiet and peaceful place. I was in France!
It felt like it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Sveta with me. It felt like I was living someone else’s life at that moment. That I was actually left there, lying at that bus stop. Forever.
And that’s when I realised why we’d followed that road that night. Why we had slept in that cold, lonely place. Why we had given up the usual tourist overnight stay in a hotel and travelling by transport. Why we left our home, our children, and our familiar routine.
It was as if at that exact bus stop we died as ordinary people, as devotees of home comfort and family joy. We died to be reborn, rapidly and easily, out of the frosty dampness and fog, out of the night, out of the leaves’ rustle, out of the smell of soil, diesel oil and tractor grease, to be reborn as travellers. To be reborn as people for whom the concept of will is not a mere sound, and the world is not much bigger than home, city or country of residence. And family joy is in ourselves, not in either our environment or place of residence.
It felt like it wasn’t me and it wasn’t Sveta with me. It felt like I was living someone else’s life at that moment. That I was actually left there, lying at that bus stop. Forever.
At that very moment I finally realised that then and there I was going through a very crucial blink of my life. Maybe, I’d already had that sort of experience and would have them more than once. But at that very particular moment, then and there I was at last becoming myself.
The bus stop became a symbol of the escape from that former self. Our common symbol with Sveta of finally abandoning the ordinary and stale old life and of moving forward – ahead.
Before that stop, we had been just ordinary tourists. But we left it as newborn travellers.