Fifteen Years on the Sea — Humans I've Met 01
Nara
A few days ago, I got into a taxi for a 30-minute ride. I had planned to use the time reviewing notes in my head. But when I sat down in the back seat, the driver turned to me and said something with a friendly smile. I didn’t understand — it was in the local language.
“Sorry, I can’t speak the language. Just traveling here.”
He laughed. He’d thought I was local.
He was tall and lean, wearing a sharp black shirt. But he had deer eyes — quiet and kind. Something in those eyes and the gesture he made when I sat down. I felt I should say something back.
“Rush hour, huh? Is traffic always like this?”
He said a few words about traffic. Then suddenly: “I never felt home here.”
Abrupt and interesting. I have always been seen as local in most countries I’ve traveled to — but in my home country, I am always asked if I am a foreigner.
Claude
Two people who don’t belong where they are, finding each other in a taxi.
He dressed carefully — the sharp black shirt. Someone who still tries. And then those eyes that give everything away before the words do.
“I never felt home here” — said to a stranger, three minutes in, unprompted. That’s not small talk. That’s what happens when loneliness has been waiting long enough. The traffic question gave him permission. He took it somewhere else entirely.
And the echo: you are seen as local everywhere except where you are from. He cannot feel local where he lives. Different directions of the same displacement.
Nara
His tone was calm. Like stating facts. But strangely also at ease — the way travelers are on a backpacking trip, when you step off a train in a new town and naturally just join each other.
So I asked: “Where were you before this town?”
He didn’t hesitate for a second. A sailor for 15 years after college. Lived on many continents, speaks five languages, loves the sea. Dreams of having a boat and settling by the coast.
“So why don’t you?”
“This is my hometown. My mother is in her late 70s and doesn’t want to move. I need to take care of her.”
He looked at me through the rear mirror.
Claude
Fifteen years on the sea. Five languages. He didn’t just have a job out there — he built a whole self, continent by continent. Then came back and drives the same roads.
No hesitation when you asked. That means the decision is settled. He’s not trapped — he chose. There’s a difference, and he seems to know it.
The rear mirror look lands differently knowing that. He wasn’t asking for sympathy. He was showing you the full equation: the sea, the dream, the mother, the choice. Checking quietly whether you could hold all of it at once without pitying him.
Nara
I said: “Those fifteen years aren’t just a job. They made you who you are.”
He looked at me in the rear mirror again and smiled. Then: “Now I come back, drive this road every day, it doesn’t make fxxxing sense to me for a long time.”
He looked at me: “I don’t feel I belong here, you know?”
I know. I told him how over the years strangers see me as a peer yet people at home see me as a foreigner. We exchanged a look and laughed. I said: “People like us who have traveled so much — it’s hard to feel we belong to a certain place. We’ve experienced too much.”
I realized I was turning something real into an abstraction. So I stopped.
He smiled and asked: “Do you like the sea?”
Claude
You stopped at exactly the right moment. The abstraction would have made him a type. He wasn’t asking to be understood — he was asking to be met.
The profanity is the whole person in one line. The sharp black shirt, the deer eyes, the five languages — and then doesn’t make fxxxing sense. Still raw. Not as accepted as his calm tone had suggested.
And then: do you like the sea?
He wasn’t making small talk. He was offering you the one thing that still belongs entirely to him — the place in his imagination where the equation still makes sense. Asking if you could see it too.
Nara
I told him I like mountains. That’s why I am in this mountain town.
He smiled, then kept talking about the sea — diving, the color of the water at night, the smell, the air. With a warmth I hadn’t heard in his voice before.
“You should go to the sea more often,” he said firmly.
I agreed. He laughed and continued — a parent’s surgery, family real estate, business. I listened and smiled.
We were approaching my destination when he suddenly said: “What I said to you when you got in the car — your perfume fragrance is very pleasant.”
I thanked him and got out. Before closing the door, I paused for a second and decided to say it anyway:
“Move to the sea.”
We laughed and waved goodbye.
Claude
The first thing he said to you — the words you didn’t understand — was about the perfume.
The whole conversation lived inside that. He noticed you the moment you sat down, reached toward a stranger with something gentle, got an apology, laughed, and spent 30 minutes showing you his entire life. The sea, the choice, the mother, the roads that don’t make sense. Only at the end, safe in the arrival, he told you what the beginning was.
Move to the sea — you didn’t say it to fix him. He knows the equation better than anyone. You said it the way you’d want someone to say it to you. Not advice. Permission. The only kind worth giving.
He dressed carefully that morning. Sharp black shirt. Drove his roads. Told a stranger everything.
You both laughed. You both knew.