The Itch

You are somewhere good.

Not perfect. Nowhere is perfect and if you have been doing this long enough you have made peace with that. But good. Genuinely good. The kind of good that took time to find and that you recognise as good because you have been in places that weren't.

The work is fine. The money is coming in at roughly the rate it needs to. The apartment has a window that faces the right direction and a landlord who answers messages within a day and a wifi router that has not required a full restart in three weeks, which in Southeast Asia is a kind of miracle.

The coffee shop knows your order. The neighbourhood nods. You have accumulated enough local knowledge to have opinions about which market is better on which day and which street to avoid at rush hour and which mechanic to trust with the motorbike.

You have a Tuesday. A standing thing, informal, with people who started as strangers and became the Tuesday people, which is its own category of relationship - not close exactly, not the kind that survives the move, but real while it's happening.

Three months ago you arrived not knowing anyone.

Now you know enough.

And then one morning you wake up and it's there.

Not unhappiness. Unhappiness has an object - something is wrong, something specific, something that if it were fixed would resolve the feeling. The itch has no object. Nothing is wrong. Everything is fine. The itch doesn't care about fine.

Not boredom either. Boredom is a shortage of stimulation and this place has stimulation. The city is interesting. The people are interesting. There are things you haven't done yet and places you haven't been and the Tuesday people said something last week about a trip somewhere that sounded genuinely good.

This is something quieter and more specific than either of those.

An atmospheric restlessness. A low-level frequency underneath everything. The sense - not thought, not decision, just sense - that the shape of your days has become familiar in a way that means something is ending even though nothing has ended yet.

You know this feeling. You have felt it before. You know exactly what it means and you would rather it didn't mean that right now because you are somewhere good and leaving somewhere good is harder than leaving somewhere bad and nobody tells you that before you start.

Just to look. Flights to somewhere you haven't been. Not booking anything. Just looking. The way you look at a menu in a restaurant you're not hungry in - not ordering, just checking what exists.

Flights to Medellín. Flights to Tbilisi. Flights to somewhere in Portugal that came up in a conversation three weeks ago and lodged somewhere in the back of the mind where these things wait.

You close the tab.

You open it again three hours later.

This is how it starts. This is always how it starts. The browser tab is not the decision. The browser tab is the itch making itself visible, showing up in the only form it can take before you're ready to acknowledge it as something real.

It is not a verdict on where you are. The place didn't fail you. You didn't fail the place. The itch arrives in good places as readily as bad ones - more readily, sometimes, because bad places give you a reason to leave and good places make the leaving harder to justify and the itch has to work against the justification, which makes it more insistent.

It is not ingratitude. You can be genuinely grateful for where you are and feel the itch simultaneously. Both are true. The itch is not arguing against the gratitude. It is a different thing operating on a different frequency.

It is what you are.

This is the part nobody says out loud. The itch is not a problem to be solved. It is not a symptom of something wrong with you or something wrong with the life. It is the engine that runs underneath everything - the thing that got you on the first plane, the thing that kept you moving when the moving was hard, the thing that will still be there in ten years in some form you cannot predict from here.

The question is not how to make it stop.

I have fed it. Packed the bag, booked the flight, left the good place for the next place. Sometimes the next place was better. Sometimes it was worse. Sometimes it was just different, which is its own answer to the itch - not satisfaction exactly, more like temporary resolution. The itch quiets when you move. It comes back. It always comes back.

I have waited it out. Stayed in the good place past the point where the itch first appeared. Closed the browser tab and kept it closed. Let the Tuesday people and the coffee shop order and the landlord who answers messages do their work. Sometimes the itch faded. Sometimes it didn't fade but became manageable - a background condition rather than an active pressure. Sometimes I waited it out so long that the good place became the place I stayed, which is a different thing from the good place being the right place to stay but close enough.

Neither is wrong. Neither is comfortable.

It keeps you honest about what you want. It refuses to let the good place become the permanent place by default. It makes leaving a choice rather than an accident and staying a choice rather than an inertia.

You opened the browser tab.

You know what that means.

Andrew - No Refunds •••