The Traveller

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?
Lorna didn't really like fairy tales but that was the first thing that popped into her mind when she looked at her face on the bathroom mirror. It'd been a long time since she had looked at herself like that. Most times she'd just see "flashes" of her face – she didn't bother to stare at it.
But that was a different night. For the first time in seven years, she had spent more than half an hour with one single person. It made her wonder how she looked like.
Lorna didn't care much about her face because she was ugly or something. She just didn't care. She had a very normal face, not ugly but not too pretty either, the kind of face you wouldn't notice in a crowd. Which was exactly what she wanted. So she didn't waste time examining it.

She had spent the last eleven years travelling and stayed in each place for about six months. She decided to start her trip in her own country, so she went to San Diego and Detroit and Chicago and Las Vegas and Washington D.C. and a little town (with a name she couldn't remember) in Wyoming. Then, the rest of the world: England, Ireland, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, India, Russia… Sweden at the moment. When her parents died in a car crash, they left her a lot of money. She wouldn't have to work another day in her life. So she started travelling. She had already forgotten why she decided to do it, but she couldn't think about stopping. Not that she liked it. Actually, she was very tired of it. Every city looks the same when you've seem enough of them. People are all the same, everywhere.
The countryside and the suburbs were even worse, because there was less population she was forced to interact with people. And she was sick of it.
She got herself to know ever kind of person. In Las Vegas, she had the chance to meet lots of crazy players. She inserted herself in a surfing group in Brazil. She signed in theatre club in London. She joined a hippie community in the USA. She lived with an American Amish during a week; she couldn't stand it any longer. In Dublin, she became a member of a videogames house and volunteered in a hospital where she got to meet every kind of patient. In France, she took part in an alcohol rehabilitation program, even though she didn't even drink. While in Rome she enrolled in an art school. She liked that. Painting was nice. In Mexico she befriended some girls whose job was to dance in a disco and went there to get to know some of the costumers. In Detroit, she was part of a sort of a gang. In Washington D.C., she entered a wiccan cult club and when she was in San Diego she got in the vampyric community by pretending she was as crazy as them and was accepted in a House. In Finland she joined the gothic scene and the cybergothic in Germany. She was good at not being herself.

After long enough everyone was the same. People aren't that different from each other. There is always egocentric people, selfish people, boring people, annoyed people, angry people, evil people, sad people, dependent people, curious people, nice people, happy people, pathetic people, no matter what they dress like or believe in. And she was tired of it. After eleven years, she didn't believe she could find anyone different.

Lorna didn't speak a word of Swedish. English was her native language, of course, and she could do well on Spanish, French and German. So while she was in Sweden, she only went to a few shops, coffee shops and restaurants where she could be understood. It was in one of those coffee shops that she met George, who was from New York, just like her.
On Saturday evenings the café would crowd and often she was forced to share her table with someone she had never seen before nor understood. So she was surprised when a man asked her, in a perfect English, if he could sit with her. They soon realized their hometown was the same and that got them talking. George was a journalist and he was staying in Sweden for a week to write an article about an art festival that was going on is Stockholm.
Somehow, she didn't find the conversation boring. They had dinner in a nice restaurant downtown and it was already a bit late when they said goodbye.

Lorna always stayed in hotels. If you have money, hotels are the best choice: you have enough privacy and they clean and cook for you. The four-star hotel where she was staying at was an old building with green decoration.
The mirror in her bathroom didn't look young either. It was yellowish and had a lot of scratches and a few stains. But she could see her face perfectly, the face of a thirty-three-year-old woman who wasn't getting any younger. She saw that. Her skin wasn't as perfect as she it should be and there was something different in her eyes. She realized that she had the eyes of an old woman, of a person that had seen too much and is tired of the world.
Yet, she was young at heart. In her mind, she still was twenty-two and leaving home, one year after her parents' death, looking for a start-over. Oh yes. That was the reason. She remembered it. She wanted a new beginning. A new life. She had no idea. She didn't ever dream that the only thing she'd get would be a constant boredom towards the world around her. She never got what she wanted because – she realized, suddenly – she had been looking for it in the wrong way. The solution wasn't to try to find new circumstances. The solution was to learn to live with the ones she already knew. Because it's all the same all over the world. George had made her understand. He was a person as any other, but he managed to entertain her. Not because he was special. He just did.
She had been looking for the wrong thing. What she needed wasn't to find something different; she just needed to find interest in something, even if she had seen that something a million times before.

Three days later she left to Portland. George's e-mail was written on the back of her hand; she didn't have one, but she had promised him she'd create one so they could communicate. In those few days after they met, they had become almost friends. She didn't go to New York City with him because she felt that she didn't belong there anymore. But she had to live in the United States. That was her home.
She bought a nice flat with a pretty view to the city. She signed herself in painting classes. She made new friends, pretty normal people that knew how to have fun. She went back to her old job because she missed doing something.
She started her life again, after eleven almost wasted years.