Hearts Still Care

There are people whose souls awaken at airports.

People who feel restless unless they are planning a trip, booking tickets, standing in immigration queues with headphones on and a passport in hand, convinced that somewhere else — another city, another country, another landscape — life will briefly become more meaningful than the one they currently inhabit.

I have never been one of them.

And for a long time, I wondered if there was something wrong with me because of it.

People around me speak of travel with almost religious intensity. The guys, my mother, my cousin, well, my family, I would say, has that unmistakable “keeda” of travel in them — that hunger to move, to see, to constantly experience new places. I admire it in them. Sometimes I even envy it. I wish I possessed that same excitement at the thought of boarding a plane and disappearing into another country for ten days.

But I don’t.

And I think I finally understand why.

The truth is, I travelled extensively long before I ever considered physically travelling anywhere.

I was a child who read compulsively. History, geography, mythology, politics, anthropology, climate, architecture, literature — I consumed the world through books before social media turned travel into curated montages and aesthetic performances.

I did not merely learn where places existed.

I absorbed their emotional texture.

I read about ancient civilisations, wars, migrations, cathedrals, droughts, changing coastlines, empires collapsing under their own arrogance, cities reshaped by climate and greed. I read about the loneliness of industrial Europe, the silence of old libraries, the smell of rain on African soil, glaciers disappearing, forests burning, rivers shifting course.

I learnt about places not merely as tourist destinations, but as living things shaped by history, violence, weather, memory and human failure.

And perhaps because of that, I never developed the overwhelming urge to “tick off” landmarks from a bucket list.

The Statue of Liberty does not call out to me.
Neither does the Louvre.
Nor the Sistine Chapel.

Of course, there is something profound about standing where Michelangelo once stood. About touching marble another human being shaped centuries ago and whispering quietly to yourself:
“I was here too.”

But he is gone.

The moment is gone.

And strangely, that has always mattered more to me than the monument itself.

I also think my relationship with people complicates travel.

I do not hate humanity. Human beings have also given me poetry, music, cinema, friendship, love and tenderness. I write because of people. I paint because of people. I speak because of people. I care because of people.

And yet people exhaust me.

Their arrogance.
Their prejudices.
Their casual cruelty.
Their certainty about things they barely understand.

Even I irritate myself sometimes.

I can spend hours quietly creating something meaningful — writing, painting, photographing, dancing, caring for animals — and still one unnecessarily rude interaction can poison an entire experience for me.

The other day at the gym, a man was rude for absolutely no reason. I became angry and upset. I could have caused a scene. Perhaps he deserved one. But then the entire space would have become emotionally contaminated for me. It would stop feeling peaceful.

That is what people often do to places.

Online trolls ruin platforms.
Bigotry ruins cities.
Racism ruins entire countries.
One ugly interaction stains what could otherwise have been a beautiful memory.

And travel demands people.

You must coordinate with them, negotiate with them, tolerate them, trust them, explain yourself to them. Airports, hotels, immigration counters, tourists screaming into phones while standing before thousand-year-old monuments, strangers carrying their entitlement into every corner of the earth.

Perhaps I am too sensitive for modern travel.

Or perhaps I simply no longer romanticise movement the way the world expects us to.

The irony is that I did once have a great travel dream.

Africa.

Since childhood, I have dreamt of witnessing the wildebeest migration across the Serengeti and Maasai Mara. That ancient dark river of bodies moving across the earth as they have for thousands of years before human borders existed.

Animals have always moved me more deeply than monuments ever could.

But even that dream now rests quietly in the background of my life instead of burning brightly inside me.

And then there are my children.

The impossible ache of leaving them behind.

People say, “They’ll be fine.”

But they do not understand what love begins to look like after years of routine, grief, healing and attachment.

Zoe and Xena would wait by the door. Like Zoe, Zuri stops eating when her routine changes. Her stomach reacts if I am absent during her walks or feeding times. Their emotional lives are intertwined with mine, and mine with theirs.

I cannot casually hand them over to someone else and fly across the world pretending my heart has remained peaceful.

People speak of freedom as movement.

But love roots you.

And perhaps that is what happened to me.

I built a life where meaning did not exist somewhere else.

It exists here.

In my dogs sleeping beside me.
In old films.
In books.
In late-night conversations.
In rain against the window.
In creativity.
In survival.
In memory.
In familiar streets I know how to emotionally navigate.

And maybe that is the real reason I was never bitten by the travel bug.

I do not feel the desperate need to escape my life.

Vacations, for many people, are temporary relief from lives that feel emotionally lacking, repetitive or disconnected. But my life — with all its flaws, griefs, anxieties and imperfections — has never felt empty to me.

It has felt full.

Deep rather than wide.

And I know that is enough.