I wanted to be like Kerouac so badly that I even started drinking his favourite drink. I still remember the first time I ordered it at the student union bar.

The barmaid, a fellow student, frowned at me.

“Vermouth? What the hell is that?”

“It’s a fortified wine,” I said. “Kerouac used to drink it.”

“I don’t know who Kerouac is, but she sounds like a pain in the arse. Why couldn’t she just have a normal wine like everyone else?”

I spent the rest of the evening complaining about her to a friend.

“She’s probably never read a book in her life,” I moaned. “How can anyone not know who Kerouac is? She must be studying something soulless like marketing. She probably thinks Hemingway was a girl too.”

At the time, we thought we were the most interesting people in the room. In retrospect, we were unbearable.

Back then, I believed movement was depth. That if I travelled far enough, long enough, I would become someone looser, wiser, more electric. I imagined highways and revelations. I imagined a life that felt cinematic.

After university, I set off to find it.

In Hanoi, one humid afternoon, I was walking behind a young woman when she stepped into the road and collided head-on with a car. The impact was sudden and blunt. A shout. A thud. A motorbike swerving past as if nothing had happened.

People rushed forward. I stood there uselessly, strangers knelt to help, but she was already gone. I waited twenty minutes in case someone needed a witness. An ambulance came and took her away. The road was swept clean. Traffic resumed. Within half an hour the street looked exactly as it had before.

New people arrived, laughing, bargaining, checking their phones. The city absorbed her without hesitation.

I remember waiting for something to shift. For the air to feel altered. For the day to acknowledge what had happened. It didn’t. It simply continued.

I had imagined travel as expansion, as a widening of the self. That afternoon, I felt smaller than I ever had. Not a wandering poet gathering insight. Just another bystander on a pavement in a city that would forget me as quickly as it had forgotten her.

That realisation stayed with me longer than any postcard view.

And yet, not long after, I found myself slipping back into the romance of it all.

A friend was having what she described as the worst travel day of her life. That morning she had fallen into an open sewer. At lunch she drank some dubious pineapple juice and spent the afternoon vomiting. By evening her legs were covered in mosquito bites.

We lay on the beach while she listed her misfortunes. Then she noticed the sunset.

“Quick,” she said. “Take a photo of me walking alone on the beach. It looks like paradise.”

She dragged herself upright and limped into the distance.

“You’re too far away,” I shouted. “I can barely see your face.”

“Good,” she yelled back. “I don’t want everyone seeing the bites.”

Later, when we looked at the photo, it was flawless. Golden light. Empty shoreline. A lone figure in silhouette. You would never have guessed about the sewer, the sickness, or the itching skin.

In one place, I watched reality erase someone in half an hour. In another, I watched us tidy it up ourselves.

Travel wasn’t just indifferent. It was aesthetic. It offered good lighting, strong angles, a story you could choose to tell. And I realised I had been doing that too. Selecting moments. Framing them. Editing out the parts that didn’t fit the version of myself I wanted to become.

For a long time I believed that somewhere between continents I would shed my irritations and insecurities. That crossing borders would smooth out whatever felt unfinished about me. But impatience survives immigration control. So does ego. So does self-doubt. You pack them alongside your passport.

Kerouac wrote about motion as liberation. I mistook motion for transformation.

The road didn’t turn me into someone else. It stripped away the fantasy that it could.

In Hanoi, the city resumed before I had processed what I had seen. On that beach, a miserable day became a postcard. Life refused to behave like a metaphor.

I kept travelling, but I stopped expecting revelation to arrive on schedule. The road was simply a place where things happened. Some of them beautiful. Some of them brutal. Most of them indifferent.

Kerouac had highways. I had airport lounges, delayed buses, and photographs that left things out.

The road was never going to turn me into him.

It was only ever going to show me myself.

And slowly, that became enough.