The Way
'Whenever things get difficult, I want to get away.'
When we lived in California as a family, we often went on road trips. I can’t say what it was—a desire to explore this new, strange country that we’d just moved to or a need to fit in with the culture of the open road that America is all about. I remember that the four of us—my parents, my sister Kate, and I—would get in the car, our red Toyota Camry, and drive, sometimes for hours.
My father would crank up the volume, and Fastball would be blaring from the speakers:
They made up their minds
And they started packing
They left before the sun came up that day
An exit to eternal summer slacking
But where were they going without ever knowing the way?
I was sitting in the backseat with my sister, our seatbelts around us. Mine was hurting my neck, and I constantly wanted to take it off but was afraid my parents would notice.
Back in Russia, nobody, not even the drivers—especially not the taxi drivers—put their seatbelts on.
“Ah, shut up!” Abdulla, a taxi driver from Central Asia, would snap, clicking the seatbelt behind his back as though silencing an unruly child. To him, the car manufacturer's obsession with safety was a personal insult—a ceaseless beeping accompanied by a flashing red symbol on the dashboard. “Stupid, stupid car,” he’d say.
If you were so bold as to put your seatbelt on, Abdulla, a taxi driver from Central Asia, would eye you suspiciously in the rearview mirror and shake his head. “What, you think I can’t drive?”
“No, just, you know, safety,” you’d reply, embarrassed.
Abdulla, a taxi driver from Central Asia, would shake his head as if to say, what a pussy. Then he’d overtake a car in front of him by using the opposite lane and going over the speed limit, as if to show—see how I can drive, huh?!
I never put my seatbelt on when I lived in Russia, but it was the law in California. So, buckled in the backseat, my neck got red scratch marks. I’d watch the landscapes whoosh in the window, listening to Green Day on my iPod Nano, as my family would drive to Los Angeles or San Diego and its Sea World or Lake Tahoe to ski. As a kid, it always amazed me how a mere four-hour drive from our home in Palo Alto, where even in January, the temperatures would rarely get below 10–15°C and the streets were covered in palm trees, could transport you into Real Winter in the mountains of Sierra Nevada. The crunching snow underneath the feet felt like home, even in the above-zero temperatures.
But my biggest memory of those road trips is drinking copious amounts of Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi—whatever was in the fridge. And how, after an hour of riding in the backseat, I’d want to pee.
“I need to use the bathroom,” the nine-year-old me would squeak from the backseat, the gorgeous Highway 1 moving in the window, with its spectacular view of the Pacific.
“But we just left home!” my mother would reply, turning around to look at me.
“Yeah, we’re not stopping just for you,” my father, who was silent most of the drive, would suddenly echo. He’d make eye contact with me in the rearview mirror and say, “You’ll have to hold it in until we stop for gas.”
We drove a little further, and I spotted a man standing at one of those Vista Points stops, where you can take a break from the drive, stretch your legs, and snap a photo of the view. His back was turned to the roaring waves of the Pacific, and he was kneeling in front of his car.
“What an idiot,” my father said as we passed him. He shook his head and clicked his tongue. “The view is so breathtaking, and here he is, taking a photo of his damn car wheel.”
The three of us—my sister, mom, and I—laughed at this comment. And as I did, a little pee came out.
When, thirty minutes later, the pain in my bladder became unbearable, I’d start to scream and plead and yell for my parents to stop anywhere so that I could relieve myself.
“It’s probably just the anxiety of moving to another country,” my would-be psychologist mother said quietly to my dad, though not too quietly, so I could hear everything. We were, after all, in the same car.
It’s funny that she said the same thing, explaining my sudden weight gain at 12 when we moved back to Russia. Ignore the fact that I was stuffing my face with chocolate chip cookies daily and have a history of eating disorders in the family (my grandfather died of morbid obesity). Or that I didn’t do any sports and spent most of my time playing Dota 2 on my Sony computer. No, it was the immigration anxiety.
“We should have that bladder of yours checked out,” my father said, unwillingly pulling over to a gas stop with a McDonald’s, which my mother always taught me and Kate to refer to as a “public restroom where, for some reason, people also eat.”
He added, “Just FYI, this is the last stop we’re making before we reach our destination. Better make it count.”
It wasn’t even the Diet Coke or my parents’ annoyance with me needing to pee that scared me. It was the notion that if I needed to do something as natural as pee, I wasn’t able to. Not having any agency whatsoever over my life—even in the simplest things—made me feel weak, a useless nine-year-old crybaby. The prospect of pissing my pants didn’t make things better.
It never dawned on me to stop drinking Diet Coke on our road trips. I’d seen my father enough, always in the driver’s seat (my mother didn’t get a license until her mid-thirties), sipping on his own aluminium can, his gaze perpetually stuck in the distance, thinking big thoughts.
I loved studying my father like that. In other moments, he seemed unpredictable and frightening, and I’d have to play it by ear to avoid punishment. But when he was lost in thought, I could control, study, and, eventually, imitate him.
In late 2023, when Juliet and I were on the verge of separating, I desperately wanted to leave. It’s a defence mechanism—whenever things get difficult, I want to get away. Where to—matters less, as long as it isn’t here.
So, one night, lying on the couch in the living room, I logged on to Trainline and bought train tickets to a place my father had visited once on his first trip to the UK—a coastal town called Scarborough.
In the morning, before Juliet woke up, I caught a train from King’s Cross Station to York, then switched to another for the final stretch toward the coast. I love those moments spent staring out the window, watching the landscapes blur past, letting my thoughts drift between the profound and the trivial, scribbling notes in my journal, and sipping on a Diet Coke—just like my father used to when I was a child.
In moments like these, it feels like I’m on the brink of some great revelation about myself, my life, or the people around me. More than that, it feels like I am supposed to be. It is as if someone is watching over my shoulder, like a teacher at school, waiting for a spark of realization. But, more often than not, the big insight never arrives.
Instead, travelling alone gives me something far more valuable: a sense of being grounded. In the most literal sense, whenever I go somewhere alone and spend the night, I feel my two feet firmly planted on the ground, as if I’ve reclaimed my connection to myself. Having lived in large cities all my life—Moscow, Boston, and now London—I’m struck by how easy it is to lose that connection. In cities, especially when you share your life with someone, it’s as though you’re always moving but never truly arriving. The antidote, I’ve found, is simple: escape the city as often as you can.
I exited the Scarborough station at sunset and went straight to the sea, up the hill, then down. I’d never been in this part of the country before, and the water here was different—more violent than in Brighton, the nearest oceanfront town to London. England is small and tiny compared to the US or Russia, but it can be so different if you dare to look.
A pair of golden retrievers played on the sandy beach. Their owner—a lady wearing a long anorak—threw sticks into the water, and I watched as the two happy dogs rushed into the crashing waves, grabbed the sticks, and raced back to repeat the process. The November wind blew hard against my face, and I buttoned my coat.
I inhaled the sharp sea air, focused my hearing on the cries of seagulls, and closed my eyes in a micro-meditation moment. My thoughts wandered to how my father had lived here, in this very town, for a few months when he was my age to learn English. I remember him returning to our apartment in northern Moscow, bringing CDs of Franz Ferdinand and Reamonn—popular bands at the time and the ones I’d listen to on repeat for most of my childhood.
Here I was, in the same town, at the same age as my father was then, living in the UK, though with no kids, no business, and none of the certainty his generation seemed to have and mine doesn’t.
I thought back to my life in London, some 200 miles away. My wife of two and a half years had recently told me she didn’t want to keep living with me anymore. Back at home, it was chaos. But now, in this fake reality in a town where I knew nobody, I was free in this little life that I’d created for myself. I could lock myself up in my room, watch TV, and eat nachos all night. I could go on long walks, and nobody would worry about me. I could get drunk at a pub. I could make new friends. I could read and write all day long.
Once you connect with your mind, you are who you are, and you’re free. Even if it is just for a couple of days.
Last July, when Masha had left for Moscow, and most of my friends were on one vacation or another, I found myself in the Eurostar lounge at 4 in the morning, a Diet Coke in hand, entertaining myself by looking at the people around me.
The terminal was full of signs in French, which made it feel like I was already somewhere else, not 800 meters from the flat on Russell Square that I had just woken up in. (Platform—Quai; Coaches—Voitures; Bienvenue!) There were also many Americans, for some reason, probably on a trip from London to Paris by train. (“I mean, like, isn’t it soooooo romantic?”)
Sitting there, I thought about how much I preferred trains to planes. Everything feels simpler. For one, you’re not hurled 10,000 meters into the air inside a steel tube.
And yet, planes, too, have their magic—that in-between space where nothing feels quite real. It’s my favourite place in the world, whether on a plane, a train, or a car, as long as I’m going somewhere. That liminal state, neither here nor there, is pure happiness. You’re nowhere and everywhere all at once. The same goes for airports and train stations—miniature worlds where different languages, lives, and stories collide, all crammed together in beautiful proximity.
I looked around and instantly noticed an American, a Russian, and a British couple. It’s so easy to spot certain nationalities without even hearing them speak. The secret lies in the non-verbal clues you can easily pick up on if you’ve lived in those places.
For instance, the British look at everyone and no one at once as if perpetually apologizing for something they can’t name. Americans are always self-assured as if they own the place, the world, their oyster, busy with their own thing, too relaxed. Russians are always suspicious, choosing one person to stare at.
I wondered what people thought when they looked at me. Being a weird mix of cultures and accents, people rarely guess where I’m from unless I tell them.
But isn’t that the future—being from everywhere and nowhere? Citizens of the Earth? How do you answer that stupid question posed by anti-immigrant communities and the border control officers at Gatwick: “No, but where are you really from?”
My train was called for boarding, and I couldn’t help but think how strange everything felt. Here I was, 26, unemployed, heading off on a trip to Europe—but for what purpose? To do what, exactly?
Memories of countless road trips I’d taken over the years surfaced, all with the same aim: “thinking things over, reading and writing, being alone with my thoughts.” Other People—whoever they are—don’t need that kind of time.
But it sounded like the perfect escape for me—being alone, caught somewhere between everywhere and nowhere, suspended in the middle of it all, teetering on the edge of adventure. Stripped of the familiar, all that remains is yourself.
Since early childhood, I knew I needed to be alone for long stretches of time. If I don’t get that time—if I don’t have a space of my own—I get frustrated, annoyed, and irritable. In moments like these, my mother calls me a hedgehog—spikes flying in all directions. But alone, I can finally think, breathe, and be myself.
I looked at the girl in front of me who had a black iPhone case that said FUCK HAMAS.
And I thought, the life we’re all trying to build—a life filled with purpose and meaning—takes time. It’s not easy. It’s lonely. It might take years, even decades.
It’s like one big, never-ending solo road trip.
And as with any journey, what matters isn’t how fast you’re going but that you’re still moving, making progress, and looking forward to the next stop.
As Fastball sang:
You can see their shadows wandering off somewhere
They won't make it home
But they really don't care
They wanted the highway
They're happier there today, today…
What matters is that there’s always something beautiful to catch your eye out the window.
And that, whatever happens, there are always toilet stops along the way.
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P.S. Here’s the track I mentioned in the essay.