Looking back at the last seven weeks of my life feels a little unreal.
It began quietly enough. The weekend before a long-awaited summer trip to Switzerland, a dear friend and I sat down for an impromptu healing session focused on my left knee. The knee had become its own character by this point; injured, stubborn, and carrying far more history than a ligament should.
Somewhere during that session, the conversation drifted beyond the physical injury. Toward the heart. Toward grief. Toward all the things we carry without realising it.
When we finished, my knee felt lighter. More stable. Less burdened. So did my heart. Only a little.
At the time, I had no idea that was merely the beginning.
The following weekend, I boarded a train for my 16 days in Switzerland. That part had been planned. Everything that followed had not.
On the very first day of the trip, I re-injured my healing MCL and tore through scar tissue. Just like that. The stability I had spent months rebuilding vanished. Most people would probably have slowed down. I limped through Bern instead. Without a brace. Without much common sense. But that wasn’t the surprise.
For some time, there had been a place that occasionally appeared in my dreams, and visions. Somewhere I had never visited in waking life, yet somehow recognised.
I knew where it was. So one morning I boarded a regional train from Bern toward Solothurn, simply because I wanted to see the Jura by the window, from the dreams. When I arrived in Solothurn, another old dream location appeared in front of me. I smiled. Not surprised anymore.
Then I boarded another train toward Langenthal.
I was limping around town, and a bus almost hit me. It happened so quickly that there was barely time to react. And then it was over.
A second later, something felt different. Not physically. Internally. As though some invisible gear had shifted. I stood there in the middle of Langenthal thinking: This feels different. I had no explanation for it. No evidence. Only a strange certainty that something had changed.
A few hours later, back in Bern, the person I had been dating unexpectedly ended things, after our Aare date.
The timing felt absurd. The bus had appeared out of nowhere. So had this.
The next day, rain fell over Bern. I spent hours drifting between cafés and bars, watching the city through rain-covered windows while consuming more cappuccinos and alcohol-free beer than anyone reasonably should.
And somewhere in that rainy stillness, something opened. Or perhaps something stopped resisting. I didn’t see visions. I didn’t receive messages from the universe. I simply found myself resting in a peace I had never known before. A quiet bliss. A sense that nothing was missing. A feeling that everything I had been searching for existed much closer than I had imagined. Inside. Nirvana, I thought. It was better than anything you can possibly imagine.
The rest of the Bern trip unfolded gently. Conversation with strangers. An unexpected extension of my stay. Long limping walks. Visiting the zoo to pet the goats I formed emotional bonds with over the years. Rain. The Aare. Life being life.
One morning I found myself talking to a girl I had just run into. At some point I told her I wanted to stop dating and focus on myself. She laughed. “Every time we say that,” she said, “the universe sends a test.” We both laughed.
Later that same evening, while walking back from Marzili, a man stopped his bike and started talking to me. Fifteen minutes later, he asked me on a date. Of course he did. The universe clearly had a sense of humour.
The next day we met. It was perhaps the least romantic date in history. We spent most of it people-watching and observing a speed-dating event from a safe distance like wildlife researchers studying a rare species.
Eventually we said goodbye and returned to our separate lives. I remember laughing all the way back to the hostel. “Only in Bern.”
A few days later, I left the city in tears. Again. Leaving Bern had become its own ritual. I always cried on the train. Because every visit seemed to bring me closer to myself. And I knew the next time I returned, I would not be the same person. And I knew Bern would never feel the same way it has when I was asking for it to complete me.
In Wallis, something else shifted. The walls around my heart finally came down. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just enough. Enough to stop running. Enough to stop arguing with what I felt. Enough to accept love without demanding that it become anything. It happened in Brigerbad of all places. A location I never expected would become that important.
But life rarely asks for our preferences. It simply chooses the classroom.
Around the same time, I finally got the knee brace I should have had months earlier. A small miracle disguised as common sense.
When I returned to Milan, I brought a different version of myself back with me. Or perhaps I simply stopped leaving that version behind in Bern.
The bliss I had found in Bern slowly followed me home. Even into a city I had spent years struggling to connect with, simply because I find it doesn’t have a soul I resonate to, unlike dear Bärnsy.
Then came my birthday. Rainbows appeared over valleys. Thunderstorms rolled across mountains. The weather seemed determined to cycle through every possible season in a single afternoon. Life felt playful. Generous. Alive.
I had been obsessed with the idea of painting the sky with rainbows simply because that is what Trinity and Neo had decided to do at the end of Matrix Resurrections. A movie I watched more than any person has business doing so simply because it is too relatable once you look beneath the black coats, sunglasses, and guns. Lots of guns.
After my birthday, somewhere between paying taxes at the post office and slipping into that familiar state of nirvana again, another realization emerged.
My heart was open. I was open. But my roots were still learning how to hold it. Safety.
That was the missing piece.
Soon after came another trip to Wallis. Healing sessions. Massage therapists. Long conversations. Moments of surrender. For the first time, I gave myself permission to fully heal. Not just physically. Emotionally too.
There is something profound about finally becoming willing to release pain you have carried for a long time.
Being vividly imaginative as I am, I saw the golden grid inside my body shining, and me having the ability to direct it into places in my body that need healing. New skill unlocked, I thought. An unexpected result of the healing session we have done. But these things are always, to say the least, unexpected.
The following day, a physiotherapist worked on my knee. By the end of the session, I could bend it again without pain. Full range of motion. Stability returning. The body remembering.
Later, during meditation, I experienced a sense of wholeness unlike anything before. Wholeness. A quiet feeling that nothing inside me was at war anymore. Both sides of me were online. Sitting in the same room, without running from each other. “That’s what coming home to yourself must feel like.” I thought.
On the journey home, I imagined dancing on a mountaintop with every version of myself I had ever been. The child. The teenager. The dreamer. The wounded one. The one who kept going anyway.
I listened to songs that once carried pain and found only joy. The past had not changed, but my relationship to it had. I felt joy for the journey I spent more than enough time not accepting. Not believing in. Rejecting. Trying to run from, and more importantly trying to rationalize my way out of.
A week later, I experienced gratitude in a way I had never known before.
I imagined a life containing everything I thought I wanted. The place. The people. The future. For a brief moment, it was all there.
And what surprised me was not the vision itself. It was the feeling.
Full. Breathing in. Full. Breathing out. Full.
As though nothing needed to be added. As though nothing had ever been missing.
Looking back now, it still amazes me that a trip that began as a hunt for dream locations somehow transformed into a journey through my own inner landscape where it now feels as though two versions of myself had finally sat down at the same table.
The one who spent her life reaching for the sky, and the one learning how to keep her feet on the ground. For years they had taken turns running the show. Now they seemed willing to coexist. I no longer felt pulled between worlds. Somehow, I had become both.
It started with a left knee. A train. A city. A near bus hit in Langenthal. And somehow ended somewhere entirely different.
And the funny thing is, I knew this was my destination all along. I just had no idea how it would unfold. And most of the time, how we get there is the most fun part of it all.
Enjoy the ride.