Burning Fast & Bright: Digital Nomad Friendships

I said goodbye to another friend yesterday. No matter how often I do it during this crazy digital nomad journey, it never gets easier. The long embrace, the welling of tears in my eyes, the promise that I may or may not fulfill that we’ll “see each other again”.

It’s strange – there are some people I can feel with almost absolute certainty that I will see again, somewhere in the world, no matter how long or how far we go. I can feel our energies tautening across the universe, pulling back like the string of a bow in anticipation of some future moment of release that will bring us careening back together again.

And then there are other moments where, even as I say the words aloud with every willful intention to make them true, I can already feel the person fading into the distance. It’s as if the moment the words hit the air they begin to dissipate and as I watch them sauntering off into the distance I can feel a part of myself whisper, “I don’t think I’ll ever see you again. But I really hope I do.”

It’s not the magnitude of the friendship, but something completely beyond myself that whispers, “Until we meet again” or “I think this is goodbye”. It’s the same voice that whispers, “This is a person I’d love to know” when I meet someone new in a hostel kitchen or a coworking space or on a tour of this or that beautiful location, and with just a few words we suddenly find ourselves diving into the depths of the intricacies of life and skipping merrily past the shallow introductory phases of the typical casual conversation. Walking along strange streets or cobblestone paths as we meander along lost in conversation and the vastness of the world.

Friendships while traveling burn hot and bright, flaming into existence with the swiftness of a match striking a stone and flickering out almost as quickly as one or the other of you jets off to the next destination or returns to the familiarity of home. It may only be a day or a week or sometimes a few hours, but by the time you wave goodbye, you’ll feel strangely as if you’ve known them for a lifetime while simultaneously understanding that you might not ever truly know them at all.