I think we all become different people on vacation. I know I become the girl who smokes cigarettes on a balcony, listening to “I Drink Wine” by Adele, as if she’s the main character in a movie nobody’s watching. I become the girl who hooks up with a stranger, only to leave and cry to her best friend, thinking she might be impossible to love. I become the girl who dances with strangers under neon lights until our sweat mingles into something euphoric. I become the girl who finally feels like she knows what she wants, only to wake up and realize that, perhaps, she was only borrowing that certainty for the night.
Vacations have a funny way of making you forget the life waiting for you back home. They also make you forget who you’re supposed to be.
On vacation, nobody knows your history unless you tell them while slurring your words over a half-empty glass of wine. Nobody knows the version of you that you don’t recognize anymore, the mistakes you’re trying to forget, or the person you promised yourself you’d become. You’re just another fleeting stranger among people equally determined to escape their lives back home.
On my 22nd birthday cruise, I met two women I affectionately dubbed “the criminals.” Their real names are Jen and Heather, but after a couple of drinks, the nickname was considerably funnier.
When my best friend and I met them on the beach, we were deep into our favorite bit where we loudly talked about having slept with each other’s dead relatives. Naturally, when Jen and Heather told us they’d met in prison, we assumed they were joking. Later, over espresso martinis, they explained they’d recently graduated from what they jokingly called “drug school.” They recounted the horrors of their addiction with smiles on their faces, treating their arrests like punchlines to jokes they’d been telling for years.
There was something beautiful about watching two people turn their pasts into stories they laughed about. I didn’t know their histories, and I certainly wasn’t qualified to understand everything they had gone through, but for a couple of nights, I got to listen and laugh with them.
Room 15219. That was where I was supposed to go. But after a few too many drinks, I knocked on rooms 15129 and 15192 before returning to the club to ask my best friend for the room number again. With the room number saved in my notes app and some words of encouragement, I did something I rarely do: I knocked on the door of a man I’d just met, ready to have sex with him. I only knew two things about him: his name was Sean, and he was from Wales.
For a moment, it felt like something out of a movie. He held me on the balcony, his mouth against mine, and I let myself get swept up in the novelty of it all. Here was a man who knew nothing about me, and I knew nothing about him. He didn’t know my insecurities, what I was afraid of, or how often I questioned whether there was something fundamentally wrong with the way I loved. But as I lay sprawled across his bed, something felt off. How was I supposed to hand over my most vulnerable parts to someone I’d never see again?
I left without a last name or phone number, carrying only the memory of his phantom touch. But maybe that was the point. Maybe I wanted the excitement of being wanted without the terrifying possibility of being known.
Then there was the girl who felt like looking into a mirror. She approached me because she liked my back tattoos, and I saw her every night afterward. Something about her mannerisms, words, and the person she seemed to be reminded me of myself. I was drawn to her because she felt familiar.
There are people you spend years trying to understand, and then there are people you meet on vacation who make you recognize something about yourself in just a few drunken nights. You don’t need their whole story to feel connected. Sometimes, all it takes is a familiar feeling in an unfamiliar person.
Then, of course, no vacation would be complete without the side characters who make you question whether you’ve wandered into a sitcom. There was the man in his fifties who spun me around on the dance floor while wearing a suit jacket I mistook for a cardigan. Then there were the “Godfathers,” who bought me a drink that tasted absolutely terrible, but were so sweet about it that I couldn’t help but tell them it was the best drink I had ever had. I also got the number of a man who dressed as Michael Jackson every night and had the best moonwalk I’d ever seen. Maybe I’ll visit Jacksonville one day just to see those moves again.
Then there was J-Dog, who announced to the whole bar that I was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen and proceeded to order me lemon drop shots (the way to my heart). At the infinity pool, I met a woman with whom I shared a beer as she casually shared one deeply traumatic life fact after another. She told me how she essentially spent her life cruising, guided by a simple philosophy: If you always stay moving, life can’t hit you.
I’m not sure she’s right, though. I suspect that eventually, no matter how many miles you put between yourself and your problems, they’ll catch up. Still, I understood the appeal of waking up somewhere new, surrounded by people who don’t know what you’re running from.
The sad part about vacation is that eventually, it ends. You return to your responsibilities and the person you were before you left. The people you danced with disappear into different cities, and the strangers whose stories briefly became part of yours return to lives you know nothing about.
But the people we meet on vacation aren’t insignificant because they’re temporary. A stranger can make you laugh when you desperately need to. Someone’s story can remind you that people are more complicated than the first impression they give you. Sometimes, another person reflects a part of yourself you didn’t know was there. And sometimes, a man from Wales holds you and makes you realize that being wanted isn’t necessarily the same thing as being understood.
I used to think that the people who changed me would be the ones who stayed around. Now, I’m not so sure. Maybe some people are meant to exist only in a particular place and time, and their significance isn’t measured by how long you know them, but by what you carry away from knowing them. And maybe that’s the beautiful thing about meeting people on vacation: you don’t have to keep someone forever for them to leave something with you.