I’ve often searched my room, only to come up empty-handed. I’ve sifted through cabinets without result, and rummaged around the kitchen, not finding the spices to enhance my dish. I stare and peer without seeing. As a child I used to ask my Mom, and she’d magically fish out any item I’d name. Now Indi helps me in the same way. I stare and stare. But I do not see.

It got so bad I started needing glasses. Pressing my face to the page, looking for the right quote, or inside my wardrobe, looking for that ripped old shirt, much beloved over all the others, I stared myself blind. At first I had trouble adjusting to this new glass barrier between myself and the world. But eventually I learned it actually helped me stay in touch with reality. Once in a while, and then only with luck, I might actually find what I’d been searching for.

But growing up near-sighted, I’d grown accustomed to wandering the house, looking for things right in front of my nose. Of course I’d look under my bed and between the couch cushions before realising my brand new glasses simply rested on my head. Still I never realised that what I’d been looking for needn’t be all that hidden. Most often, it can be found right near the heart. 

And so with the freedom of becoming eighteen I continued, almost out of habit perhaps. I travelled all around Europe, looking and searching. I felt restricted and my quest turned out without result. Perhaps what I’d been searching lay somewhere further. I reached Africa, first with friends, and then when I could find no one to follow my folly, all alone. Onwards to the Near-East, India, and all the way past China, I found myself in Japan. I looked and looked.

The stimulation of all that was different, the people, the language, their fashion and architecture, the lay of land and the light of the sun; all this helped distract me from what I slowly began to realise. I went South, swimming among tropical fish, none of whom could answer my questions, and then North, among icy expanses, where not a sound but the whisper of the wind told me what I already knew. 

Only now, a month after my departure from Tokyo, have I found what I’ve been searching for so many years. I’ve only recently realised I’d never lost it at all, and that it was right under my nose all along. Sitting in the sun, between the old streets of my home town, with bronze bells up in the tower announcing the hour, I felt a bit silly. I’d been trying to find all my answers so far away from where deep down I knew they lay. 

Of course that doesn’t mean I can get rid of my glasses now. I still need help to see. And as I love travelling too much, I won’t give up that passion either. I only hope I can learn to do so more patiently. Not quite so out of breath.