The Vagabond Artist
There is a kind of freedom that tastes like salt on the tongue and wind in the lungs, a freedom stitched from unpinned maps and train ticket stubs, a freedom that belongs to the one who carries her life in a backpack, and lets the rest of the world fall away. She has chosen that life, the vagabond artist, the wanderer who owes no address to anyone and whose days belong only to curiosity.
The world is her studio, her sketchbook, her canvas spread across continents. her brushes are the strangers she meets in quiet cafes, her palette the shifting blues of oceans and skies. Each morning is a blank page, and the joy of it all is that she never knows what colour will touch it first.
She has no mortgage, no letterbox, no calendar taped to a kitchen wall. Instead she has train whistles and ferry horns, the clatter of coins on foreign counters, the whispered song of languages she only half understands. she has freedom stitched into her coat lining, joy knotted not her shoelaces.
They say a person should have a home, a rooted place, somewhere to return. But her return is everywhere. Her hearth is the campfire of companions gathered for a night, her roof the constellations leaning down to listen. she belongs to the wide roads, the crooked alleyways, the endless horizons that never stop asking her to follow.
The joy is in the not knowing. the joy is in arriving with no plan, in stepping off a bus in a city whose name she can barely pronounce, and deciding that this is exactly where she needs to be. she is loyal only to her wonder, and wonder has never led her astray.
Some would call it reckless. some would say she is wasting time, wasting years, wasting her future. But how can one waste what is constantly overflowing? She is living in abundance, sunrises, first encounters, laughter under rain that soaks through her clothes but never through her spirit.
Her art is not separate from this life, it is this life. Every crooked street is a a line in a drawing, every overheard story a brush stroke on a painting, every fleeting romance a stanza in her poems. To wander is to create, to create is to wander. The two are braided so tightly it is impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends.
She has learned to be rich in moments rather than possessions. Her wealth is measured in stamps on a passport, in meals eaten on stone steps, in friendships forged and dissolved like morning mist. She carries no regrets, only stories, stories that can be retold and reshaped, made into art that breathes long after the moment has passed.
Sometimes the wind is her companion, sometimes solitude. Sometimes the joy is loud, dancing in a plaza with strangers, music spilling like wine from every window. Other times it is quiet, the stillness of sitting by a river sketching the ripples, or watching her cat stretch out in the sun and thinking “yes, this is enough”.
She does not envy those with houses full of furniture, rooms lined with wardrobes, garages stuffed with things they cannot carry. Her belongings weight less than her joy, and that kind of freedom she feared she’d never feel.
Freedom tastes different to everyone. To her, it tastes like a slice of bread torn off by hand on a train across Europe. Like the bitterness of espresso in a city where no one knows her name, Like mango juice running down her wrist on a hot afternoon. Freedom is not perfect. It is messy. It is unpredictable. it is full of missed trains and lost socks and nights spent searching for somewhere to sleep. but perfection was not her goal anymore. Aliveness was. And aliveness she has found. Thrives in motion.
There are mornings when she wakes not knowing where she is, the ceiling unfamiliar the air scented with spices she cannot place. There are afternoons when she loses her self in a museum, not for the paintings themselves but for the way the light falls through tall windows, or the way a stranger tilts her head while gazing at a sculpture. there are night when the stars seem so close she imagines she could pluck them down and sew them into her dress.
What does it mean to belong? Once she thought it meant family tables, addresses etched into forms, roots pushing down into familiar soil. Now she knows that belonging is light than that, it is the ability to walk into a place and say “Yes, for this moment, I am part of you” and then to walk on, carrying the essence without the chains.
The joy of her life is that she never has to ask permission to follow her fascinations. If she wakes tomorrow and wishes to chase the call of the sea she does. If she feels pulled to a mountain town where the air is sharp and the people peak slowly; she goes. Her curiosity is the compass, her wonder of the north star.
And in truth, she has no regrets. Regret is born in the what if, and she lives in the what is. She does not mourn the house she never bought, the steady career she never built over decades, the expectations she instinctively never carried. She mourned nothing, for she has everything that matters. The constant unfolding of life in its most vibrant of colours.
The vagabond Artist does not choose safety, she chooses freedom. She does not choose permanence she chooses presence. She chooses to dance barefoot in train stations, to write poems on napkins, to paint faces of strangers who will never know they are immortalised in her sketchbook. She chooses joy over comfort, curiosity over certainty and it has made her infinitely rich.
For what is life, if not a canvas waiting to be filled? And what better paint than the raw pigments of experience, the bright yellows of laughter, the deep blues of solitude, the wild reds of love discovered and lost in a single evening? She is not lost. She is not rootless. She is planets in the moving earth. In the wide sky, in the sea that kisses every shore. her home is everywhere. Her heart is the always. Her art is the proof that she has lived, frely, joyfully, without hesitation.
And so she goes on, bag slung across her back, smile tilted toward the horizon, ready for the next street the next city the next wonder waiting to be uncovered. because to live without regret is to not live without mistakes, it is to let every mistake become part of the painting, every misstep part of the dance. and she, the Vagabond Artist, is forever dancing.