I am travelling alone now for the first time on this trip, having previously stayed with friends or friends-of-friends. I like the feeling, though it’ll end soon enough.
(I call it a ‘trip’, but since I don’t have a flat to go back to, everything I own is in two bags I have with me, and I’m doing (a little) work as I go, is it really a ‘trip’? Aren’t I just… here, now?)
I’m in Luzern now, holed up in a hostel for a few days to do some freelance work.
I went for a run along the lake just after arriving. As I run along a gravel path by the lake, freshly green trees lining its length, a group of runners rounded a corner ahead. It was 5 men, each more of a clichéd Swiss man than the last - blonde hair, chiseled jaws, blue eyes. They ran almost abreast and in the same uniform of white shirts, black shorts, and white running shoes. The middle runner ran slightly ahead, the others forming a line just behind him. They weren’t intimidating - they smiled as they ran and seemed to be talking happily amongst one another - but they didn’t break formation for anyone coming in the opposite direction. As they ran past me (my chest stuck out and my belly sucked in, my face set in a grimace of what I hoped looked like vague disinterest), the leader inclined his head in a nod of exactly 15 degrees. No more, no less. A simple, quick gesture of acknowledgement, one runner to another.
I thought about them as I ran around the lake and wondered how different each of their lives were to mine. It helped pass the time. I imagine they wear tasteful, mechanical watches and starched shirts. They’re slow to anger but quick to defend their friends, and they’d be the first to ask a stranger to apologise for knocking over a lady’s glass of wine in a restaurant. Should the stranger not, and dare to insult the lady further, they’d be the last to start the ensuing fight but surely the first to end it. They’d not get hurt in the affray - not seriously, anyway - and any minor wounds inflicted on them would be caused by something dastardly or uncouth on the part of the stranger, like having a metal plate in his head or, being cut from a lesser cloth, simply exploding when punched by so just and earnest a human being. Overly stern fathers, dutiful husbands, firm Believers, constant runners. The kind of man who, in another time, would’ve made a good Paladin or Knight-errant. Somehow imbued with a healing nimbus and +5 against the Undead.
A girl smiled at me on the way back. A simple smile in the afternoon sunlight intended specifically for me. Uncomplicated. It made me happy.
