Day One: Anticipation
21.09.2025 (Warsaw, Poland)
It's now just five days until I leave Warsaw for Belgrade. Three months in a city I've deliberately chosen to flirt with and to deconstruct. Typical David.
I caught myself hovering over a YouTube video yesterday - "10 Must-See Places in Belgrade" - and closed the tab. There's something violent about those words, "must see," as if the city exists only to fulfill someone else's checklist of experiences. I want to arrive empty-handed, carrying nothing but an address on Beranska Ul. and whatever courage I can muster.
My only reference point is the map on my phone - Belgrade rendered as flat lines and coloured zones. No texture, no smell, no sense of whether the streets climb hills or stretch across plains. The map tells me everything and nothing. It's a kind of violence, this reduction of a living city to coordinates and street names.
I keep thinking about green screens in film studios - how actors perform against blank backgrounds that become anything in post-production. Maybe all places are like this now, waiting for us to project our meanings onto them.
The difference this time for me is, I want to resist these projections. I want to be undone by whatever Belgrade actually is, rather than confirmed in what I expect it to be.
There's something almost naive about this approach, and I'm okay with that naivety. In a world where every corner has been photographed, reviewed, and rated, choosing ignorance feels like an act of personal rebellion. I'm traveling not to consume Belgrade but to let it consume me, to see what happens when you strip away the safety net of prior knowledge.
The strangest part is that I don't even know if I'm seeking authenticity anymore - that word feels too corrupted, too commodified. Maybe what I'm really after is the possibility of being genuinely surprised, of stumbling into moments that exist outside the predetermined narratives of what a place should mean.
This time next week, I'll wake up in a city that exists for me only as an abstraction. I'll step out into streets that have no associations, no memories, no inherited significance. It terrifies me and thrills me in equal measure to be honest.
I wonder if travel, in any meaningful sense, requires this kind of deliberate vulnerability - this willingness to be lost before you can be found.
Who knows. I'll soon find out.
Day Two: Anxiety
22.09.2025 (Warsaw, Poland)
Just four days now, and the anxiety arrived this morning like clockwork. I recognise this pattern from every significant departure - this peculiar creeping dread that masquerades as practical concern but is really just fear of leaving safety behind. I like to call it "Ooji Koalah".
The strange thing is, I literally cannot identify a single specific thing I'm anxious about. Nothing concrete, nothing I could name or address. It's not the drive, not the border crossings, not the language barrier - it's something more formless, more fundamental. A kind of existential static that emerges a few days before any major trip, as if my nervous system registers the approaching displacement before my conscious mind catches up.
This time around it started when I began packing. The physical act of folding clothes, of emptying drawers, triggers something primal. Each item I throw on the bed feels like a small betrayal of this Warsaw life I've built, this apartment that knows my routines, my preferred corner of the sofa, the exact angle of morning light through the windows.
Maybe the anxiety isn't about anything - maybe it's about the approaching void, the deliberate erasure of context that I'm choosing. Maybe it's the fear of floating, of existing without the thousand invisible anchors that tether us to a sense of place and self. I'm about to become temporarily homeless not just physically, but ontologically.
I feel like I'm performing what I'd best describe as practical archaeology, trying to deduce what unknown Belgrade will demand of me through the objects I select. But each choice exposes my ignorance and feeds this shapeless unease. The anxiety hovers around the edges of every decision - not telling me what to fear, but simply that I should be afraid.
Maybe the fear is sharper because this isn't just travel - it's an experiment with my own capacity for displacement. In four days, I'll wake up as nobody in particular, in a place that owes me nothing. Perhaps the anxiety knows this before I do, registering the magnitude of chosen unknowing before my rational mind can rationalise it away.
Just, maybe...
Day Three: Flow
23.09.2025 (Warsaw, Poland)
Three days left, and something has shifted completely. The anxiety that gripped me yesterday has dissolved, replaced by something I can only describe as hyper-alert calmness. I'm relaxed yet electric, grounded yet expansive. It's as if weathering yesterday's shapeless fear cleared some internal blockage.
I've had one of those rare mornings of pure creative flow. My sobriety work felt effortless - insights arriving without strain, connections forming naturally. The blog concepts that seemed tangled yesterday suddenly organised themselves into clarity. When creative energy moves like this, unforced and abundant, I remember why I trust these experiments with displacement and unknowing.
There's something about approaching departure that heightens everything. Colours seem more desaturated today, thoughts more meaningful, the ordinary details of this Warsaw life more precious for their approaching absence. I'm experiencing that strange blessing of impermanence - how knowing something will end makes it more vivid, more fully present.
The packing continues, but without yesterday's archaeological anxiety. Today it feels more like preparation for an adventure than preparation for exile. I find myself selecting items not from fear of what I might need, but from curiosity about what I might discover. The notebooks feel lighter in my hands, full of possibility rather than obligation.
I catch myself visualising ordinary moments - the way morning light falls across my desk, the view from my balcony, the arrangement of books I'm leaving behind. Not out of sentimentality, but from recognition that this version of my life, this particular configuration of routine and space, is about to transform completely.
This feeling - blessed, excited, hyper-alert yet calm - maybe this is why I choose deliberate displacement. Something in the approach to unknowing awakens parts of awareness that routine living keeps dormant. In three days, I'll discover what Belgrade makes of this energy, how this creative flow adapts to completely foreign ground.
For now, I'm simply grateful for the reminder that anxiety and excitement are often the same energy, wearing different masks.
Day Four: Beautiful Horror
24.09.2025 (Warsaw, Poland)
Two days left, and I'm feeling incredibly mellow today. Not the electric flow of yesterday, but something deeper - a quiet awareness that the journey wants to begin, paired with contentment to let it unfold at its own pace. This relaxed state feels like a budding flower opening my mind to perceptions usually filtered out by the urgency of daily routine.
Here's a thing though, walking past a high school this afternoon, I was struck by something quite unsettling: the sounds emerging from inside reminded me viscerally of a slaughterhouse. Not metaphorically - literally the same quality of distress, of systematic processing, of resistance being methodically overcome. Both institutions process bodies according to abstract logics, transforming wild, authentic beings into standardised units. One produces meat, the other produces "productive citizens," but the acoustic signature of institutional violence remains remarkably consistent.
Moments later, I found myself walking through two housing estates with names that felt like messages: "Meander" and "Belgradska." Given my upcoming move to Belgrade and my habit of wandering without destination, it felt as if the city itself was writing the script of my departure. Warsaw's streets seemed to anticipate my narrative, exteriorising my psychological geography in concrete and signage.
Working on another dialogue project earlier, I noticed how the act of documenting these philosophical experiments transforms them completely. The conversation becomes artefact, becomes trace, becomes more real than the original experience it claims to represent. What was once a living exchange becomes a monument to its own occurrence - the perfect example of how even critique becomes consumed by what it critiques.
This awareness feels important as I approach Belgrade. I'll be documenting daily, creating traces, building an archive of encounters. But each entry will simultaneously capture and kill the experience it describes. The blog will become more real than Belgrade itself, the simulation replacing the territory even as I try to resist simulation.
Perhaps this mellowness comes from accepting these impossibilities - the impossibility of authentic documentation, of escaping institutional processing, of moving through the world without becoming part of its scripted narratives. There's peace in recognising that the experiment will inevitably consume itself, that consciousness encountering its own reflection always produces this recursive loop.
Two days until I discover what story Belgrade wants to tell about itself, and what story it wants me to become part of.
Day Five: Hibernation
25.09.2025 (Warsaw, Poland)
One day left. Who knew. I'm moving in slow motion today, gathering things around me like an animal preparing for winter. Everything needs to be done, packed, ready - but the urgency has dissolved into something heavier, more deliberate. A kind of inertia tinged with quiet desire to move.
The chores are almost complete. Each task ticked off the list feels both significant and meaningless. I'm performing the rituals of departure - checking documents, organising bags, closing accounts - but my consciousness has already left. I'm inhabiting this Warsaw apartment as a ghost inhabits a house, present but not quite here.
There's a paradox in this state: I want time to move faster, to collapse the remaining hours between now and Belgrade, yet I'm moving through those hours as if underwater. Wishing time away while simultaneously experiencing its thickness, its resistance to being wished away.
Hibernation feels like the right word. Not sleep exactly, but a kind of withdrawal, a gathering inward before the enormous expenditure of energy that displacement requires. I'm conserving something - attention, perhaps, or the capacity for surprise. Wrapping myself in the familiar routines one last time before stripping them all away.
The apartment knows I'm leaving. There's a quality to these final hours that feels like mutual acknowledgment - the space and I recognising that our relationship is ending. The light falls differently through the windows, or perhaps I'm just noticing it differently, aware that tomorrow's light will fall in a completely foreign place.
I catch myself looking at ordinary objects - the coffee mug, the desk chair, the corner where I always leave my keys - with a kind of tender detachment. They'll still be here after I've gone, continuing their existence without me, which somehow makes them both more and less real.
One more night in this particular configuration of self and space. Tomorrow, the hibernation ends and the real experiment begins.
Day Six: Suspension
26.09.2025 (Slovakia)
Well, I made it to Slovakia. A straightforward drive from Warsaw, watching the landscape transform as I moved through mountains, architectural styles shifting with each kilometre. The crossing itself was at once frictionless and monumental - a line on a map that changes everything and nothing.
Somewhere on the road today, an analogy arrived that I can't quite shake: this pseudo-nomadic life I've chosen feels like being a particle in permanent suspension. I'm floating in the fluid but not dissolved into it, maintaining my boundaries while all the other particles around me disappear into the solution. They merge, become indistinguishable from the liquid itself, while I remain visible, distinct and alone.
There's something both liberating and isolating about this state. I'm mobile, able to move through different contexts, different countries, different versions of reality. But I'm also fundamentally separate, refusing to dissolve into any particular place or community. Never settling, never becoming part of the solution, always remaining that visible particle drifting through.
Slovakia is a very different fluid than Poland. I can feel it in the air, see it in the people and the way buildings meet the sky. I can sense it in the rhythm of how things move. And I have Hungary and Serbia still to cross tomorrow - more fluids, more contexts that will hold me without absorbing me.
I haven't gotten my head around this condition yet. What does it mean to choose permanent suspension? To deliberately remain undissolved while watching others merge seamlessly into their environments? There's a freedom in it, certainly - the particle can move where the dissolved cannot. But there's also an existential loneliness in maintaining these boundaries, in refusing the comfort of dissolution.
Tomorrow I continue toward Belgrade, carrying my particle-self through more transitions, more border crossings, more shifts between one solution and another.
The experiment deepens: what happens to consciousness when it chooses to remain forever suspended, forever distinct, forever in transit between states it will never fully join?
Day Seven: Collision
27.09.2025 (Belgrade, Serbia)
I made it. I'm finally here.
Belgrade hit me immediately - not gradually, not gently, but as a full-force collision with reality that no amount of philosophical preparation could have cushioned. This is a thriving city of disorganised chaos, dirty and run down in ways that feel honest rather than neglected. The trams are ancient, rattling through streets with their own internal logic that has nothing to do with published schedules.
The people move differently here. More random, faster, with an energy that makes Warsaw feel almost choreographed by comparison. The city is hilly and green in ways the flat map could never communicate. Everything is just so different - the textures, the sounds, the quality of movement through space.
Since arriving yesterday, I've witnessed kids begging at traffic lights, people methodically going through bins, gypsy folk fighting in the street. The buses and trams operate on some mysterious timetable known only to themselves. None of this was in any hypothetical travel video I refused to watch, and all of it feels more real than anything those sanitised simulations could have shown me.
The particle has collided with a fluid that refuses to behave like a fluid. Belgrade doesn't ask me to dissolve - it's too busy being itself, too occupied with its own chaotic energy to care whether I integrate or remain suspended. There's something liberating about encountering a place that doesn't perform for observers, that simply is what it is without apology.
And here's the truth I didn't anticipate: I love it. This messy, honest, chaotic reality that bears no resemblance to abstraction. It might take time to adjust, to find my rhythm in this different tempo, but the collision feels right. The experiment has truly begun.
The blank screen wasn't blank at all. It was just waiting to reveal itself on its own terms.
More on Belgrade:
David Henzell
