Relationships I've Formed on the Road

a new series

Relationships I've Formed on the Road will be an occasional series—essays in 200 words or fewer about connections I’ve made while traveling. In the comments, I’d love to hear about your on-the-road relationships, too.

The plumber brought his daughter to work. He was fixing the water heater in my Airbnb and he needed a part he didn’t have, so he left her with me for an hour. It was raining. I made her macaroni with butter. She said she’d never had pasta before, and she liked it, but she liked rice more. She told me that sometimes all the girls in her friend group would suddenly turn on one person. I flashed back to fifth grade, when I slipped and fell in the mud and an awful child stood over me, pointing and laughing like a bully from a movie. The plumber’s daughter said, “I don’t care who talks to me and who doesn’t.” We were in a Mexican beach town, where the infrastructure can’t support the glut of tourism, so the power goes out most afternoons. Even though it was daytime, when the lights snapped off, we were sitting in the dark, as if at a slumber party. She said she wanted to ride a motorcycle to Paris. She had a ponytail to her hips and I imagined her in a helmet, speeding down the highway, soaring right over the Atlantic.