Luke, around the world.

It is the 8th of February 2017, and I am standing with B on the terrace of a building in Swieqi. The weather is unusually hot for this time of the year, even for Malta, but I don’t know it yet. Nor do I know that B is a hoax, a swindler, a dishonest but very apt salesman who never gets any job done, but always creates promising (and fruitless) visions. I don’t know and I don’t care. For now, he is my gateway to this little Mediterranean paradise. B will shrink and eventually disappear completely; his shadow, in contrast to his own words, is very short. But the island will grow and overwhelm me and change my very essence.

Just a month ago, I had no idea I would end up here. Life is funny, you see a job posting, you decide to apply, as a joke, as an insignificant test to check how far you can get in the recruitment process. They probably won’t even reply, will they?

We are going to Malta, chirped K when we met D and M in one of those post-communist restaurants serving herring and vodka in Krakow’s historic center. She was more excited than me, and I still couldn’t believe that after my first (and, I was quite certain, last) visit to Malta, marking the end of my recruitment process, I would get a positive answer. Was I really moving, was it really happening? It was spontaneous, but in an insane kind of way. You will be far away from your dogs, J warned me, but I knew she meant herself. She was right, but it’s just a three-hour flight to Poland, isn’t it?

I moved to Malta right after Easter 2017; K lost some of her initial enthusiasm, but eventually joined me in July. That’s when we also got the cats, two brother kittens, a smaller tuxedo one, and a bigger black one, both of them still with underdeveloped cranial features and protruding, scared eyes.

Then Malta happened, and then, in the blink of an eye, it was over, as if I had just woken up from a very long and beautiful dream.

I don’t even know where to begin. My final stretch with K, a convulsing, spirit-destroying break-up but then, whatever doesn’t kill you… with me retaining the custody of the cats and staying in Malta. All that followed or happened in-between: the histrionic C who proved to be way more vanilla than during those drunken talks on the third floor of the office, way more conservative than during our shenanigans with a pocket mirror in a deserted side alley of St Julian’s; T’s visits, including her first one, with B, which unexpectedly developed into a menage-a-trois that was just as pleasant as it was toxic; and T’s slow withdrawal after the third visit, until she was no longer the same person.

The final farewell with J that cast us into nothingness only occasionally interrupted by birthday wishes or condolences; a burning hole in the side that turned into a scar that turned into an ancient memory in the back of my head. Learning to live alone and actually enjoying the loneliness, trying to become, and succeeding in becoming less chaotic, more grounded, calmer, more likable, but more withdrawn as well. Happier with the little things.

I couldn’t have done it without the people I’ll forever call my friends. Back to my recruitment: I talked to the whole team, and there was this guy standing at the bar of the office kitchen, his name was K. We talked and I knew immediately he was a kindred soul, same interests, same attitude, similar dreams. L, with whom I share a lot of love for all the little furry creatures, joined us soon after, and I can’t even retrace the steps of how it came to be, it was perfectly natural, organic, as if all the pieces of the puzzle miraculously fell into place. The three of us started meeting, and that’s how I also met J, and I met N, and their innumerable friends, and for the first time since uni I felt like I belonged somewhere special, somewhere safe. Bingo or board game nights, a birthday karaoke tradition me and N came up with (our birthdays fall on the same day), just popping up for some pizza and talk and wine, outings to the beach, barbecues… during one of which I met (another) L, a lovely, no-nonsense, bona fide sailor who became an ever-important person keeping my sanity in check.

Apart from K and L, there were other people at work, too. I am not too fond of corporate work, perhaps that’s why I am temporarily a vagabond, but working in Malta was a wonderful social experience. The entire data and CRM teams, casino visits, flying to Barcelona or Lisbon for team-bonding, or just staying in Malta in a beachfront Marsaskala villa for the weekend. And then there were all the Friday fikas (a Swedish tradition), the same routine every Friday, first at Cork’s, then Memories, the Russian Karaoke, maybe a strip club because that was the only place where you didn’t have to shout to talk to people… I met countless people during those outings, and a few of them became lifelong friends. Thinking of M, and our rides back home, and our sunset conversations around Tuffieha or Armier, our brunch catch-ups, and an innocent love you and love you too, things I needed to hear, things that were and are true in their own peculiar way.

It was around the time COVID hit that I gave up on Paceville and started exploring and appreciating the beauty of Malta’s nature more. The beaches were still my favourite – perhaps not in the season, perhaps not during the day, but what could be better than a Golden Bay sunset, just a little off-peak? Or the walks from Mistra through Imgiebah all the way to Ghadira, various trails, various combinations, desert-like and scorching in the season, invitingly lush in the so-called winter. The winter was also when I preferred going to Comino; I remember one such walk with my boss M and his friend, and A, dense schools of jellyfish dancing synchronously in cold February seawater. Or Mdina at night, the silent city, or Valletta, which first-timers to Malta always consider some bustling capital, but it’s just a historic centre, walkable in half a day. The flat that I’d grown to call my own even though I was just a tenant, preposterous interactions with the landlords, the gecko basking on the crumbling terrace walls, the cats curiously peeking through, the view getting more and more obscured due to unfettered construction, countless bottles of cheap wine drank and pissed out, and her clothes, abandoned when she left, and the books I bought compulsively to fill the space, quite a collection that I had to and eventually did transport to Poland.

It is the 23rd of June 2025, and I am here again, the first time since 2017 as a tourist, enjoying the view from L’s terrace, and a flood of memories keeps crashing against the walls of my prefrontal cortex. So I’ve had my grand journey through the Balkans, maybe that’s enough? I’ve trapped myself with promises I made to myself, to others, but life in Malta was… exactly what I wanted, and exactly what I needed.

Although a chapter’s closing, I know I am always welcome here, I will always come back, but it may never be the same; probably similar, but fundamentally different. Because I am different, too.

The night before my flight we are having dinner at an Italian restaurant in Valletta and almost everyone is there, and I know that if I enter that plane to Istanbul tomorrow, I won’t come back for a long time. The next morning, I meet with M. We have our final meal at Two Buoys, one of our regular places, and then we’re on the way to the airport, and then I’m gone.

I can’t stop now. I have to keep moving on this long way back home.