Trains and Growing up
By: Denitsa Yosifova
Tags: Trains, Adolescence, Personal Narrative, Travel, Creative Non Fiction

It was a foggy Friday morning in October. I met with my classmate at the traffic light in front of his apartment. I would pass through there on my way to school every day for years and we’d often walk without so much as saying “hello” to each other. He would put his earphones in, listening to loud heavy metal at 7 a.m. and I’d just ignore him.

I don’t remember how our friendship started. We just ended up talking to each other at school, and one morning we met at the traffic lights, and we started walking together. Actually together — talking about the weather and whatnot. Since that day, we’d go to school together almost every morning. At some point, we started hanging out even during the weekends — we would just sit on a bench in the park with an apple cider and a bag of chips. It was our thing. We’d talk about everything and nothing at all, he’d play some hideous metal music, and I’d try to be polite and say, “It’s not so bad, you know.” It was worse.

I didn’t tell my friends and my family because I knew they would assume things; neither of them believed that a guy and a girl could be just friends.

One day we met at our usual spot, we started walking towards school, and out of nowhere, we struck up a conversation about traveling. We both wanted so badly to go somewhere. “Tomorrow, 9:50 a.m., meet me at the train station,” he said. “We’ll just catch the first train that comes, and we’ll go somewhere.”

The next morning, I told my parents that I was going to a friend’s house to study. I couldn’t tell them I was going with a guy to get lost deliberately. He and I met near the train station and bought two apple ciders and a bag of chips from a nearby shop. We then bought two tickets to Beloslav, or Povelyanovo, or Sindel, or something along those lines. We just liked the sound of those names — random villages that we knew nothing about. We got on the train and went in the very back of it, next to the toilets, where we could look at the rails without saying a word. ‘Where are you going?’ the ticket inspector asked us. ‘We don’t know,’ we replied, laughing.

The best view can be seen from the back of the train, November 2020

We went, and we got lost, and it was beautiful. We climbed a hill, petted a donkey, made wreaths out of weeds and twigs, and just walked for hours without a direction. We talked about life, about his anger issues, and my strict mother. We also talked a lot about traveling. He was really into some YouTuber who vlogged his adventures around the world on a motorcycle. To go abroad was a dream we both had, but we couldn’t make it come true for different reasons. He didn’t have the money, and I couldn’t because my mom would never let me.

I started traveling relatively late in my life. Other kids in my elementary school would bring me souvenirs from their family trips abroad and tell stories about the Egyptian Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Mediterranean Sea. To say I envied them would be a terrible understatement.

The first time I traveled solo was also the second time I ever got out of the country. I had just turned 18 and could finally cross the border without legal complications. I was engaged with this NGO that offered youth exchanges financed by the Erasmus+ program. They asked me to join them for a project in France. Fully funded. The only downside was that I couldn’t go on the same flight as them, so I’d have to make my own travel arrangements. I skipped this part when I told my parents that I was going — no way they would’ve let me go on a train, a flight, a bus, and another train in a country where I didn’t even speak the language, on my own. So I gave them as little information as possible as I embarked on an adventure.