No one tells you how loud silence can be
until you’re 37,000 feet in the air
and all you can hear is your own breathing,
the low hum of the engine,
and the echo of what you just left behind.

The trip is over.
The people, the laughter, the inside jokes,
the music in the street,
the way the air felt different all of it now behind you.

You look out the window,
but the sky doesn’t comfort you like it did on the way there.
Now it just stares back blank and unbothered.
Like it didn’t just watch you fall in love
with a new version of yourself.

There’s a strange weight in your chest.
Not sadness exactly.
More like a mix of gratitude and grief.
Like you’re trying to hold onto a dream
that’s slipping through your fingers,
even as you try to hold your composure
in seat 14A.

You scroll through photos,
but it’s not enough.
Because the memory isn’t in the image it’s in the feeling.
And that feeling doesn’t live in your camera roll.
It lives in the quiet.
in the smell of a street you’ll never walk again,
in the eyes of someone you may never see again.

And maybe the hardest part
is that no one back home will fully get it.
You’ll tell them about the sunsets,
the food,
the funny misunderstanding at the train station…
but it won’t hit the same.
Not like it did when you were there.

So you sit with the silence.
You don’t fight it.
You let it do what it came to do process,
archive,
and soften the goodbye.

Because this silence?
It’s proof that it mattered.
That they mattered.
That this version of you 
who showed up, said yes, laughed loudly, trusted strangers was real.

 And that’s the thing about travel.

You leave with souvenirs.
But you come back with a slightly different heart.