The company I work for—slash, am enslaved by—is based in Italy. So I go to Italy once or twice per year, and also to Luxembourg, where the company is more recently headquartered. I’ll go there next week, and meanwhile I’ll spend four days in Paris beforehand. I’m currently on the plane to Paris.

I went to the airport immediately after presenting to an executive visiting our research center. In the company culture, visits from important people are treated as the highest priority. You prepare your slides weeks in advance, and review them with however many bosses are in the chain of command between you and the executive. If you have vacation or other non-local plans scheduled during the week of their visit, you’ll be kindly advised to change them. The cinematic transition from the executive meeting to the airport, dressed in a suit at the terminal, felt both genuinely cool and also like a consolation for trying to split my personality up in too many ways.

The presentations I do tend to go well. Enough that my bosses have taken a liking to them. Now, I say, when we’re expecting a guest, they practically pull me out of a chest, like a gimp. Not all, but part of the reason I present well is that I basically disassociate while it’s happening. Wearing a suit and tie and giving a presentation about the business of sweet packaged foods is so out of alignment with who I am that it requires me to exit my body to make it look authentic.

The grown woman sitting next to me on the plane right now, by the way, is watching a movie on her phone—dubious activity enough—but the real problem is that she doesn’t have the phone propped up at an angle. It’s just laying flat on the tray table, and she’s staring down at it. Her face is parallel to the tray table, like she’s searching for her reflection in a puddle. I can’t handle how non-ergonomic it is, and I almost fear for her. I want to create a makeshift kickstand and help her. Let her know she doesn’t have to do this.

Back to me basically self-mythologizing. I decided to go to Paris because a good friend of mine will be there before my business trip. She happens to be my former boss from years ago. This weird thing has been happening the past couple of years where our respective travel plans randomly synchronize. I’ll be booking a work trip to Italy, and then get a serendipitous email from her, subject line: “going to Milan?” It happened again this year. Naturally, we make plans to see each other.

The last time, we met in Milan and walked through the city, following a route that was endearingly hand-drawn and given to me by one of the Italian toy designers I work with. The walk was four hours long. We just walked and talked.

This activity—walking and talking—is in close contention with “dinner” as my favorite social activity. All other social activities are competing for a distant third place, honestly. They’re the best activities for connecting with another person through conversation.

So anyway, the walk in Milan wound up being one of the most restorative days I can remember having. Two years later, I still get a boost of energy thinking about it. When I hesitatingly confided this to my friend, she said, it turned out, that it had the same effect on her. I’m trying not to raise my expectations about the upcoming day-long walk in Paris, but it has all the ingredients to be special.

Besides that, I don’t really know what the f&%# I’m doing in Paris. I feel weird about it, actually. The mood is that the trip is inconveniently intersecting with my recent realization that I’ve become an itinerant person. The last five years, I’ve traveled about 25% of the time. I’m switching apartments, again, in a city I still feel new to. Being an unconventional person makes it challenging to find My People in the new place. Looking ahead, my job is the kind where, in the next 24 months, I could be propositioned to move to a different continent, resetting the project of finding My People. I’m still single, and unmoored that way, too. Being so on the move has required me to learn new strategies for feeling grounded without the usual anchors—favorite routines, spaces, and objects—which has been challenging, though highly useful. Between those things, and also this blog, it seems that I’ve randomly fallen into some emo-drifter lifestyle—bouncing from place to place, packing bags, feeling feelings. Sometimes I strongly dislike it. But it does seem better than just hanging out in my apartment.

At some point, this blog will have less self-analysis and more substance. Here are the first photos from Paris, for now.