The flight search sat open in a browser tab for eleven days. I know it was eleven because I kept switching back to it and watching the little date stamp creep forward, a small patient reminder I kept declining to act on.
It was the same trip both times. Same coastal town I’d been meaning to see since a friend described it to me years ago, the kind of place with one good bakery and a view worth the drive. I priced it out, closed the tab, opened it again a week later like the numbers might have changed my mind for me.
The cost wasn’t the hesitation. I want to be honest about that, because it would make for a tidier story if it were. It’s a five-day trip, not a financial decision I need to sleep on, and I know how fortunate that is.
What actually stalled me was smaller and, if I’m honest, a little embarrassing once I named it. There was no one to bring.
Not no one who’d want to come. I have a sister who’d have said yes on a Tuesday with no notice. What I mean is that some old, unexamined part of me still treated a trip like this as something that only counted if it had two names on the reservation.
So I booked it for one. Then, three weeks later, I actually went.
The part I hadn’t planned for wasn’t the flying alone, or the checking into the hotel alone, both of which I’d more or less done before for work. It was dinner the first night, standing at the host stand of a restaurant I’d looked up in advance because it seemed like the kind of place worth dressing for, and hearing myself say, out loud, to a stranger, table for one.
I used to think a table for one was something you got assigned, quietly, near the kitchen. I hadn’t considered you could just ask for it.
The old version of me — the one who’d have booked this same trip a few years ago, if she’d booked it at all — would have found the nearest place with a counter and a rushed sandwich and called that a reasonable compromise. Not because she couldn’t afford the other kind of dinner. Because sitting alone at a table meant for two, in public, in real light, with a menu and a wine list and nowhere to hide behind a phone the whole time, felt like being looked at for a failure that wasn’t actually happening.
Nobody at that restaurant looked at me twice. The hostess sat me by the window, which I noticed and appreciated more than I expected to.
I ordered the good wine, the appetizer I actually wanted instead of the safe one, and dessert, because apparently a woman eating alone is still allowed dessert. I people-watched instead of scrolling. I stayed for almost two hours over a meal I could have eaten in twenty minutes, just because there was nowhere else I needed to be and no one waiting on me to hurry up.
That’s the whole story, really. No coincidence, no sign, nothing I’d call a breakthrough if you asked me about it directly. Just a woman with a browser tab open for eleven days, and then a table by the window, and no one to report back to about whether it was worth it.
It was worth it.
If there’s a trip you’ve been pricing out and closing the tab on, I’d ask what you’re actually waiting for. Sometimes it’s money, and that’s a real answer. But sometimes it’s just an old rule about who’s allowed to take up a table, and that one you’re allowed to retire whenever you’re ready.
I write the smaller, unfinished version of things like this in my newsletter first, usually before I know what they’re actually about.
With Love, Wren
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