This summer, I decided to do side quests until my last day of summer break. Not a vacation, not an itinerary, a series of small, self-issued dares. Find the cafe. Take the long way.
What changed this summer is I stopped needing someone else in the room to make a day count. Some of my favourite hours, I spent completely alone, and that’s the part I actually want to write about.
There’s a version of “alone” that reads as absence — a placeholder until the real plans materialise. And there’s another version, the one I stumbled into somewhere around the third solo cafe of the summer, where alone stops being a waiting room and starts being a room of its own. I wasn’t hiding. I was choosing.
Side quests, it turns out, are a strange kind of training. Nobody assigns them. Nobody’s coming to check if you did them right. You just decide the detour matters, and then you go find out if it does. Mine were small: a bakery a stranger mentioned once, a street I had no reason to walk down, an afternoon with no plan except to see what would happen if I let myself get pleasantly lost. But the quests taught me something none of my friendships could: how to come out of my own shell without anyone there to do it for me. Asking a barista what she’d actually recommend. Journaling and reflecting on my day instead of scrolling. None of that used to come naturally. By June it did.
That’s the part people don’t tell you about solitude: it doesn’t make you quieter. It makes you braver, because there’s no one left to hide behind. The last day of my internship was the closest thing I had to a test of it. Some people got the send-off, the little gifts, the too-long hugs, the whole theatre of being missed. My own desk was quiet that day; the people I used to sit with weren’t even around. I packed up in the time it takes to make a cup of tea and left without much ceremony.
A year ago, I think that would have wrecked my whole afternoon. This time it barely slowed me down. I went and found a cafe, sat by myself, ordered whatever I wanted, and didn’t spend the hour performing okay-ness for an audience that wasn’t there. I was actually fine. Better than fine, I liked my own company enough that the empty desk stopped mattering by the time I’d finished my coffee.
That’s the trick nobody mentions: independence isn’t the absence of people. I still want my friends around, still love the noise of a group chat making weekend plans. What changed is that I stopped treating solo time as the consolation prize for when nobody else is free. It became its own kind of good, the side quest, not the fallback plan.
So no, the internship isn’t a sad ending. It’s proof the training worked. I walked out without ceremony and didn’t need one, because by then I already knew how to spend a day well by myself, and I already knew I could talk to whoever was sitting next to me and make the day feel fuller instead of smaller.
I don’t know if I’d plan a whole summer around side quests again. But I know I’d walk into that first cafe alone without a second thought. And I know I’d start the conversation. That’s the part of this summer I’m keeping.
Until next time,
tschüss,
shreymisu