We were trying to close tiny drawers, chapters, and chapters that seemed to have no end. We were always trying to write in such a simple way that we got lost in this constant search for beauty. When travelling, it's almost always easy to do this, and sometimes in our lives too.
When we look back and try to summarize things, we paint and write each day without it seeming like a routine that it wasn't. Places and days are now confused, scattered, and messy on a white and peaceful background.
When we remember Jordan as a time of peace, immense friendship, and constant surprise, we realize that there are places where learning is not obvious. It requires time and, above all, a lot of silence.
The story of our silences is another very beautiful thing, difficult to tell and understand. We achieved it perhaps from the second plane, from writing and painting, with bare feet on the ground.
Perhaps we don't know how to write or paint what it is that makes us continually miss each other, exactly one month after leaving. There were no obvious landscapes full of color and joy. There were perhaps intimidating echoes, different from any view before.
We had our eyes open almost always, attentive to everything and without fear. We walked. We went between deserts and stars, seas and rocks. We were finally in silence, broken only by immense joy, conversations, and time.
Perhaps we felt suspended.
Now that we look back—you as you paint and cut, me as I write, and a few others we met as they casually question—we do not understand.
We left without realizing what it would take to describe it better.
Describe each thing in itself. We talked about this several times because it tormented and fascinated me—this thing about us all seeing different worlds.
No one ever had an immediate answer; it was not even in the sea or on the stars. During this entire year, we were looking for answers because we were hurting a lot—wounds that are healing and healing. That was how it was during our trip.
Today, we know that we have been constantly moving around and that distances and longings do not always bring tears and letters. Times of serenity are also valid, allowing us to see the other side or multiple sides.
During this long and often painful process, we feel good alone, perhaps later, while strengthening friendships. Let's grow together and immortalize each of these silences, each stop on the road. We continually question whether or not things last as long as necessary.
Today we also know how to better understand joy and suffering, not only through our own but also through various paths, which require tearing up those old notebooks so that we can paste each page with love and patience.
When we put together this year's notebook and, even later on, the travel diary, we understood that it was impossible to finish it immediately. We were now surrounded by so many peaceful pictures that memories were dispersed across time and space. We still had words and images to paste and cut. We missed all of this so much.
About this feeling of friendship while traveling, Michel Onfray wrote the most beautiful definition:
In the exercise of friendship, the other is the least strange possible. Words are constantly shared: the silence, the fatigue, the project, the accomplishment, the laughter, the tension, relaxation, emotion, and complicity.
Their presence manifests itself before, during, and after the trip. In its ascending phase and its descending movement, in the time of desire, in the time of the event, and then in that of memory and reiteration, friendship is present, indefectible, and necessary.
In the moment, friendship makes possible the only true community that is thinkable, the disembodied complicities that time improves, improves. The trip builds friendship as much as the reverse. At the same time, they have been living in the capillarity mode that substantially feeds this transfiguration of one by the other.
In the different details of the trip, friendship allows for the discovery of self and others. We live under their eyes, day-to-day, in different, multiple, and contradictory ways. And fatigue, as we know, contributes to the exacerbation of true natures.
Walking, going and coming, eating little and poorly, drinking a lot or not enough, getting up early, going to bed late to make the most of the place and circumstances—all these occasions put the body in another state. More fragile but also more receptive, raw, with the emotion on display, as careful as an instrument's high value, the body is like a seismograph hypersensitive, therefore excessively susceptible.
Considering this logic in which infinity counts for a lot, friendship manifests itself in all its splendor.