Chapter Text
Ghlai looked down at the backpack resting against his legs.
“Passport?”
“Yes.”
“Wallet?”
“Yes, Dad.”
“Boarding pass?”
“Yes.”
There was a pause on the other end of the call. Ghlai smiled faintly. He could already tell his father was mentally searching for another thing he could ask about.
“Everything is with me,” he said before the next question could come. “I'm not going to lose my passport, miss my flight, or accidentally end up in another country.”
“That last one is exactly what you're doing.”
“I'm going to Italy.”
“After a sixteen hour flight.”
“With a three hour stop in Muscat.”
“You say that like it makes me feel better.”
“It should.”
His father sighed. Ghlai looked through the enormous glass windows beside him.
Beyond them, the airport stretched beneath the fading evening. The sky had turned soft shades of gold, pink, and lavender, the last light of the setting sun catching along the edges of the clouds.
Rows of planes stood across the runway, their white bodies glowing faintly in the warm light as small vehicles moved between them. One by one, the runway lights flickered on, tiny points against the gathering dusk.
From inside the terminal, everything looked strangely distant, almost dreamlike—close enough to see, yet already feeling like something he was leaving behind.“I'll be fine,” he said.
His voice came out softer than before.
“I know.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“I know that too.”
“Then stop worrying.”
“I can't.”
Ghlai laughed under his breath.
His father was quiet for another moment.
“Just call when you land.”
“I will.”
“And Ghlai?”
“Yeah?”
“Have fun.”
The call ended.
Ghlai stared at his phone for a second before locking the screen and slipping it into the pocket of his grey hoodie.
He exhaled.
That was it.
There was no one left to reassure.
No one left to tell him to be careful or to ask whether he had remembered everything.
For the first time since leaving home, the decision was entirely his.
And strangely, that was the part that made his stomach twist.
The fact that, for the next twenty one days, there would be no one else deciding what he should do.
He glanced down at himself. A grey hoodie, matching sweatpants, and a pair of well-worn sneakers—simple, comfortable, and decidedly more casual than what anyone who knew him would usually expect to see him wearing outside.
But comfort had won.
Sixteen hours was a long time to spend pretending he cared about looking put together.
He had dressed for the flight, not the airport and perhaps that was the first sign that this trip was already making him behave differently.
Usually, Ghlai liked knowing what he was supposed to do.
He liked having a plan.
A schedule.
He liked knowing where he needed to be and when he needed to be there and being prepared enough that surprises rarely had the opportunity to become problems.
This trip was almost the opposite of that.
He had an itinerary, technically.
Flights.
Hotels.
Places he wanted to see.
Things he wanted to do.
But underneath all of it was the uncomfortable fact that he had deliberately built a trip around doing things he wouldn't normally do.
He had wanted that.
At least, he had thought he did.
Now, sitting at the gate with half an hour before boarding, he wasn't entirely sure whether he was brave or simply very good at making questionable decisions sound reasonable.
Ghlai leaned back in his seat.
The airport moved around him. People passed with their suitcases rolling behind them, wheels humming against the polished floor. Announcements echoed overhead, sometimes clear enough to understand, sometimes dissolving into a blur of syllables that nobody seemed to listen to anymore. Screens changed destinations every few minutes. He watched it all without really concentrating on any of it.
His mind kept returning to the same thought.
Twenty one days.
He had said it so many times that it had started to sound meaningless.
Twenty one days before his birthday.
Twenty one days in which he could be somewhere else and then he'd come home.
That was important.
He would come home to his friends and family and to his university lectures .
His life would still be waiting for him exactly where he'd left it and that was what made this feel safe enough to attempt. He wasn't disappearing nor was he running away.
He wasn't even trying to find himself.
At least, that was what he'd told everyone.
He was just going on a trip. A very long, slightly ridiculous trip that happened to begin three weeks before his twenty first birthday.
He reached into his backpack.
His fingers found the familiar edge of the notebook.
He pulled it out and rested it on his lap.
The cover was already slightly bent at one corner. He'd carried it everywhere for months and it had started with a single thought.
What if I made a list?
At first, it had been nothing more than something to do. He had been sitting in his condo, thinking about his birthday, thinking about how quickly the years seemed to disappear, thinking about how everyone kept talking about twenty one as though it were some invisible doorway.
He'd wondered what would actually be different.
Nothing, probably.
He would wake up the next morning and still be himself.
Same face.
Same responsibilities.
Same habits.
There wouldn't be some sudden moment where the universe handed him an instruction manual titled Being Twenty One and yet he couldn't shake the feeling that he wanted the year to mean something.
So he'd started writing.
Not resolutions.
He hated resolutions.
They sounded too much like promises made by people who believed January 1st could magically fix everything.
These were different.
They were things he had never done.
The list had changed several times and eventually, it had become this:
21 THINGS BEFORE 21
He opened to the page.
The list stared back at him.
The last line remained untouched.
Ghlai had tried filling it in before, but nothing ever felt quite right. Every idea seemed too deliberate, too much like something he could plan and accomplish simply because he had decided to.
Maybe that was why he'd left it empty… not everything had to be decided beforehand. For once, he wanted to leave a little room for something unexpected.
The thought made him pause.
Maybe that was what the list had really been about all along. Not Italy, or Rome, or the photographs he would bring home. Not even turning twenty one.
It was the uncertainty of it all.
Ghlai had spent most of his life knowing what came next. He liked having a plan to fall back on, liked knowing where he was supposed to be and what he was supposed to do. There was comfort in that kind of certainty.
But then, there was something strangely appealing about a trip where he couldn't account for every hour. A wrong turn that led somewhere unexpected. A restaurant whose menu he couldn't understand. A conversation with someone whose name he might never learn.
Things that couldn't be anticipated, documented, or neatly folded into an itinerary.
Maybe he didn't need the trip to change him.
Maybe he just wanted to find out who he was when things didn't go according to plan.
He looked again at the first item.
Travel somewhere completely unfamiliar.
That one was easy.
He was already doing it.
Italy was somewhere he'd never been.
He didn't know what the streets would smell like in the morning or what the air would feel like outside the airport. He didn't know which side of the pavement people preferred to walk on or how long it would take him to find his hotel after arriving. He didn't know what the city would sound like after midnight.
There was something comforting about not knowing.
For once, not knowing wasn't a problem to solve.
It was the point.
He took his pen out.
For a moment, he held it above the page and then he drew a small tick beside the first line.
He looked at it.
One.
The rest waited beneath it. He wondered how many would still feel like good ideas by the time he got home.
The boarding gate still hadn't opened.
Ghlai closed the notebook and placed it back into his bag.
He looked at the departure screen.
MUSCAT.
The word on the screen had felt exciting when he'd first booked the trip. Now, sitting at the gate with his boarding pass in hand, it made the whole thing feel strangely real.
Until now, Italy had existed mostly in photographs and carefully planned itineraries. He knew where he was going, what he wanted to see, which hotels he'd booked, even how long he'd be spending in each city. But none of that could prepare him for actually being there.
In a few hours, he'd be somewhere he'd never been before, surrounded by people he didn't know, trying to find his way through a country he'd only ever seen on a screen.
The thought made him nervous.
It also made him smile.
This was exactly what he'd wanted.
Ghlai adjusted the strap of his backpack and stood as the boarding line began to move. He joined it without looking back at the terminal.
His plane was waiting.
For the first time, the trip stopped being something he'd planned and became something that was actually happening.
He walked through the gate.
His seat was by the window.
He placed his backpack beneath the seat in front of him and settled into the narrow space, pulling the hood of his sweatshirt slightly over his head.
The cabin slowly filled.
People found their seats.
Overhead compartments closed.
The lights dimmed.
Ghlai looked out of the window.
The runway lights stretched into the distance.
He thought about home but not because he wanted to go back because he knew that, for the next twenty one days, home would exist somewhere behind him.
He would wake up in another country tomorrow.
He would have to figure things out himself and make decisions without asking anyone else.
The plane began to move.
The terminal slipped past the window as the aircraft turned toward the runway.
Ghlai watched the lights outside grow brighter.
The engines rose into a low, steady roar. His hand rested over the pocket of his backpack where the notebook was tucked away.
Twenty one days.
He smiled.
Then the plane accelerated, and Bangkok began to fall away beneath him.