Seven countries, two suitcases, and one prayer I kept repeating.

Three weeks before I left for Europe, I ended the seven-year relationship that had been my one anchor through cutting off my family (a toxic family relationship, but that is a story for another post). Then I packed two suitcases, one of them the wrong size because it was my first real, DIY, trip and I had no idea what I was doing, and I flew to Barcelona anyway. Eighteen days, my first proper trip mostly on my own, and the biggest, bravest thing I had ever done. So far.

Here is the thing about a box. If you live in it long enough, you stop calling it a box. You call it caution. You call it being sensible. You call it "just how I am." I had spent most of my adult life being small on purpose, because small had kept me alive: through a family I eventually had to leave, through arriving in a new country with almost nothing, through years I spent surviving instead of living. I built walls and called them safety, and I had stood inside them so long that I could no longer see them.

Europe is where I discovered the door.

The trip began as wishful thinking back in December, a yes I whispered to the universe while I was still technically in a relationship I had already left in my head. By January it was real. We had stopped talking after the new year, the holidays were behind me, and suddenly I had every reason in the world to go and stand somewhere that did not know a single version of me.

I was not going entirely alone. Two older friends came too. One of them, let us call her Tomato, I had shared a flat with a decade earlier, back when I was still mostly surviving: head down, hermit, barely present in my own life. I had reconnected with her the year before and told her everything about who I had become since. The therapy. The boundaries. The whole renovation. I thought she had heard me.

She had been listening. That is a different thing.

The other friend, Cherry, I had met more recently. A seasoned traveller, easy and warm, the kind of company that makes a trip lighter. Tomato was a different weather system. Even before we left, in the planning chat, she would minimise whatever I suggested or laugh it off. She told me more than once that I needed to learn to get along, to feel out other people's feelings rather than simply communicating clearly, and she warned me that this trip would finally reveal what kind of traveller I really was, the way you might warn someone before an exam they had not studied for.

So I gave myself one private rule for the entire trip. Regret nothing. I had been a Christian since I was fifteen, but never really a praying person. This year that changed. Every single day I prayed the same simple thing, a refrain by the end: let good things find me wherever I go, and give me the patience to deal with Tomato. I did not have many other tools.

Barcelona

I landed into Valentine's Day, which in Asia is a quiet, private affair and in Barcelona apparently means couples kissing at the pedestrian crossing while they wait for the light to change. I watched one pair do exactly that and had to physically stop myself from throwing something. I had been single for three weeks. Cut me some slack.

It was the first time I ever smelled marijuana, a low headache that trailed me through the Gothic Quarter. And it was the first time I understood something slightly embarrassing about myself: there were beautiful men everywhere, and apparently this was my type. I had spent my entire adult life in long-distance relationships I met through video games. I had never once stood in a city full of tall, easy, good-looking strangers and simply noticed them. The breakup had not only ended a relationship. It had pulled a blindfold off. (This becomes a recurring theme. Bear with me.)

We went up to Montserrat, all stone and altitude and, yes, more beautiful men. Tomato, meanwhile, had started needling me about taking cabs, picking up a thread she had been pulling since before we even left: that I could not walk far, that I had no stamina, that I would slow everyone down. The truth was simpler, and she knew it. I could afford the cabs, so I took them, and I refused to feel bad about it. I did what I wanted, which, it turned out, was the part she could not stand.

By our last day in Barcelona, though, something shifted. The jabs stopped. Tomato had gone quiet, and it took me a moment to notice why. Her feet had begun to swell.

Paris

In Paris I had a day to myself, and I spent it walking along the Seine with my phone out, photographing every corner. Small, obviously a tourist, obviously Asian in a sea of people who were not. They tell you it is dangerous. They are right. I clocked a group of men watching me from one corner, turned around, and found another group watching from the other. Then two of them broke away and started walking straight at me.

I have never felt fear and aliveness twist together so fast. I asked my AI app where to go, actually asked it mid-panic, and it routed me off the riverbank, up a small worn path to the road. I half ran into the crowd, saw a police car ahead, and only then let myself breathe.

I ended up at a tiny restaurant on Rue Cler as the rain started. Underdressed, coming down off the adrenaline, drinking my first French hot chocolate. It was so good it almost forgave the baffling amount of free bread. (Why does every order arrive with a baguette. I barely even eat bread.) Out of pure curiosity I opened Bumble, and within an hour I had sixty likes. I matched with exactly none of them, because I was too scared. I had never really dated. So I just sat there, watching the most beautiful city I had ever seen go by, sixty strangers politely ignored.

It kept raining in Paris. I had bought myself an umbrella when I arrived, and I still had the spare one I had picked up in Barcelona. When Tomato mentioned she did not have one, I offered her the Barcelona umbrella. She looked at it and asked if I was selling it to her. It was only six euros. I was so taken aback that I just said, no, of course not.

Her feet were worse by Paris. She had not packed any painkillers, and when I offered her mine she told me she was allergic to the common kind and could only take one specific brand. I happened to be carrying two blister packs of exactly that brand. I gave her one. She thanked me, which I only mention because it was the single time in eleven days of us together that she did.

I want to be careful here, because I am not saying heaven keeps a scoreboard. But I had spent weeks being told I was the one who could not walk far, and now the person who told me could barely walk at all, and was leaning on my tablets to keep going. I had prayed every day for patience. It seems the prayer was answered, with a little interest.

I should be honest about one thing, though, so none of this reads as me being the better person. It was never that. With Jesus it is not a meritocracy and never has been. It is favour, and favour comes by faith, not by good behaviour or by being right. I simply kept showing up, and kept praying, and grace kept meeting me there. That is the whole mechanism.

Paris was also where I bought myself a Chanel bag. A little crossbody, the most extravagant thing I had ever bought for myself, while Cherry and I toasted it with champagne. The old me would have agonised over the price for a week. The new me decided she was allowed nice things and did not say sorry for it.

One day the three of us took the trip out to Mont Saint-Michel, and it was like stepping out of this world into another one. An abbey rising off the flats like something that should not be real. The sea was not even there when we visited, just vast stretches of sand all around it, because the low tide had pulled the whole ocean back. I am so glad we went. Some places you feel lucky just to have stood in.

The night before Versailles, Tomato asked me, in a tone that could strip paint, "So what time are you waking up tomorrow?" I did not take the bait. I thought about the early train, said the sensible time, and left it there. The next day Versailles was enormous and gold and freezing, the kind of place I am going back to in summer so I can actually walk the gardens.

And then, in Galeries Lafayette, I was looking at snow boots when a tall French man with very blue eyes walked up and started talking to me in French. I told him I could not understand. "Oh, you are a tourist? Where from?" Singapore, I said. He glanced down at my completely ordinary sneakers, said, "You have nice sneakers," told me it was nice to meet me, and walked off. They were not nice sneakers. But that one tiny, pointless compliment kept me smiling for the rest of the day. (See? The blindfold. It works both ways.)

The train to Munich

We took the train to Munich, and the luggage taught me something about Tomato I am still turning over.

The suitcases were stored at the end of the carriage, single file, only one person could reach them at a time. I had already pulled one of my two cases out and set it aside, and I went back for the second. Before I could, Tomato forced her way past me to grab hers first, planting herself between me and my remaining suitcase so that I physically could not reach it. I had to ask Cherry to mind my freed case until we got out.

Here is what I could not work out. There was no race. No one was being left behind. She simply could not let me go first. She had to be first. I stood there thinking, I genuinely did not know this person.

Munich and Salzburg

We arrived in Munich at midnight.

The next morning, Cherry and Tomato were up before dawn for a day trip to Hallstatt. I wanted Salzburg instead. Mozart, the abbey from The Sound of Music, and I was perfectly content to go alone. To Tomato this was, naturally, more evidence that I did not know how to get along. She even wished me a pointed "enjoy your solo" on the way out. I let it slide.

At the station, I said the prayer again, the same one as always. My train to Salzburg was delayed before it even pulled in, some problem on the tracks, and while I stood waiting I started chatting to the woman beside me. Yubing. Chinese, works in finance in Luxembourg, also travelling solo, also heading my way. By the time the train finally arrived, we had decided to spend the day together.

And it was effortless. When she wanted one restaurant and I wanted another, we simply ate apart and met up after. No drama. No tally being kept. We swapped Instagram handles and promised to see each other again, and I am already planning a trip to visit her in Luxembourg.

Cherry and Tomato had a much harder day, though not by choice. Their six in the morning train hit the same track trouble mine had, and the delays stretched it to nearly eight hours to reach Hallstatt and another four to get back, for about two hours in the town itself. They said it was beautiful, and I am sure it was. I just remember noticing, that day, how different striving looks from flow.

That night I was alone in Munich, and out of nowhere I started crying and could not stop. It took me a moment to understand why. It was my ex's birthday. Three days earlier, in fact. My mind had let the date go months ago, but my body had quietly kept it, the way a body does. I let it move through me, then pulled myself together, because I had a four-hour train to Dresden in the morning, two suitcases, and absolutely no one to help me carry them.

The adventure to Dresden

That train was where the real adventures began, and I have rarely felt more alive.

I could not lift my own luggage, so kind strangers kept hauling it for me while I blocked the doors like a one-woman traffic jam. I left one suitcase with a friendly-faced and, naturally, handsome American, essentially locking him into his seat as collateral, then sat a few rows away and could not relax for craning to check it was still there. I changed trains, the platform changed too, and I wandered in confident circles reading German signs until I more or less got it right.

On the second train I needed the toilet desperately and could not, for the life of me, get the automatic door to open. A German boy, maybe thirteen, who spoke no English, watched me grimace at the sensor for a while before tapping my shoulder and waving his hand over it. Danke, I said. He smiled, completely mortified, and fled. When I came out, he was waiting by the exit to get off, and I promptly got stuck at the same door again, waving at the same sensor, failing in precisely the same way. He helped me a second time. I am fairly sure he facepalmed.

Dresden was beautiful, my hotel was beautiful and somehow cheap, and it was a Sunday, which meant every single shop was closed. I ended up at a fine-dining restaurant, wildly underdressed, the only Asian in the room, studied like a museum exhibit. I ate my very expensive dinner anyway.

Cousins, and Prague

Then my cousins arrived, and the whole trip changed temperature.

Blackberry came first, and we spent the day touring Dresden. I loved the city, but I loved being with her more. I had known her since she was small and quiet, back when I was too shut off to really meet anyone, and here, finally, I was getting to actually know her. Then Blueberry arrived, and we fell straight into catching up and trading stories. They are twins, and I can now tell them apart without a second's thought. I felt loved. I felt seen.

The next day the three of us went to Prague for one full day of laughing and life. Travelling with people who respect you is so easy it is almost suspicious.

Blackberry came with me all the way to Dresden airport, which turned out to be the emptiest airport I have ever seen, so quiet there was barely anywhere to eat. A handsome man stepped out of a little games room to ask if we needed anything and pointed us toward food. Then there was the handsome customs officer who watched me tuck my new Chanel bag into my checked luggage before he would stamp my tax-free form, with what I am choosing to remember as quiet approval.

Oslo

The final leg was Oslo, where my cousin, big sis Mango, was waiting. She first met me when I was eighteen. She once walked up the hills of Lahug with me to help me find my first job, and I have never forgotten that kindness.

I had told her I would land at half past nine in the evening, then discovered, far too late, that I had never actually booked that flight. The one I scrambled to book instead got me in at midnight, and she could no longer meet me at the airport. No matter, I decided confidently. I would take the bus.

I walked out of Oslo airport into a literal mountain of snow at two in the morning, found my bus, asked my AI how Norwegian buses even work so I could at least look like I knew what I was doing, and rode off toward a town called Vestby. I fell asleep on board, certain I would wake at each stop. No one stopped until Vestby. The driver shouted the name, I bolted off, slid down an iced pavement, and landed hard on my backside. Nothing broke. I stood up in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning, surrounded by fog and hills of ice, unable to see more than a few feet in any direction.

I have never felt more alive in my life.

I spent three days with big sis Mango and her family, and the most well-behaved two-year-old I have ever met, who loved his dinosaurs and let me hug him constantly. I miss him just writing this. We drove to the border between Norway and Sweden, and I crossed something gloriously silly off my list: standing in two countries at the same time. We looked out over an ice-covered sea and watched people lower themselves into freezing water on purpose. I caught up with my cousin and felt, all over again, that particular warmth of being known and wanted. The people at the end of this trip made it the best one of my life.

(Big sis Mango, who now knows exactly the kind of man I short-circuit for, told me to leave it with her: she would let me know the moment she found someone interesting.)

The way home

On the train back to the airport, a handsome Mediterranean man helped me wrestle my suitcases aboard and gave me the best smile I saw on the whole trip. I have decided he counts as a parting gift.

And then, at Oslo airport on the twenty-eighth of February, on my way home, the United States and Israel struck Iran, the Gulf airspace slammed shut, and my Emirates flight was cancelled with no new time given at all. They handed out hotel vouchers. And of course, I felt alive, because here was one final adventure.

Everyone scrambled. I was too slow. Thai Airways sold out, Turkish sold out, and the only thing left was a premium seat on Finnair routing me through Helsinki and then Bangkok. I took it. By then I was genuinely exhausted to notice the Igloo that was Helsinki airport and wanted nothing but normality and my own bed. I had meant to land in Singapore at one in the afternoon. I got home close to seven in the evening. My room had become a dumping ground I would keep adding to for the next three months, but that is the next post.

What kind of traveller I am

Tomato wanted to know what kind of traveller I was, as though it were a test I might fail. Eighteen days gave me the answer.

I am the kind who gets cornered on the Seine and finds it thrilling. Who drags two suitcases through foreign train stations alone and laughs about it. Who lands in fog and ice at three in the morning, in the middle of nowhere, and feels more alive than she has in years. Who has her flight home cancelled at the edge of a war and treats it as one more adventure. Not because I am fearless, but because somewhere along the way I had stopped being afraid of the wrong things.

That is what I really came home with. Every time the trip tried to frighten me into shrinking, I prayed, and something met me there: a friend appearing beside me at a delayed train, a path off a dangerous riverbank, kind strangers on every single leg, family waiting at the end of every hard day. I slowly stopped being able to tell myself I was on my own.

I noticed something about people, too. The person who had known me when I was surviving could not stand the woman who had decided to live. But the strangers, and the cousins, and the friend I met at a broken-down train, the people who only ever met this version of me, simply let me be her. The world is not the narrow, dangerous place I was promised. It is enormous, and most of it is kind, and I can go anywhere in it I want.

What if the box you think is keeping you safe is the only thing standing between you and the actual size of your life?