It was all I could taste, despite not having touched the stuff for hours. It has a way of lingering, parsley, and I could feel it in the roof of my mouth, at the back of my throat, and in the strange unsettling warmth in my gut. This, despite the smells: the splashed urine by the grey metal toilet bowl, the beer from the Germans in the next compartment and the musk of old woollen blankets on that ancient Soviet train. It was dark, sometime in the early morning, although I’d had so much cold and flu medication—and Bulgarian cold and flu medication is much more potent than the stuff at home—plus Vitamin C, beer and, of course, the parsley tea, that I had lost any sense of time and place. I knew we were halted somewhere a few hours from Plovdiv, that men in uniforms had gathered under a single bleary yellow light outside the window and spoke in raised Eastern-bloc tones, and that all I wanted to do was lock myself in the tiny bathroom, remove the burning parsley pessary I’d inserted at the hotel an hour or so before my journey began, and check to see if it had worked. Because if it hadn’t, I would stand to lose so much of what I’d gained.

I was in Bulgaria—and Hungary and Greece and Albania and the whole of the southern coast of the continent before that—to shuck an old skin. I’d split with my fiancé just two months before. Eight years is a long time when you’re 25, and the pebble coast of the Mediterranean had welcomed me warmly. I hadn’t been restoring broken fragments of myself so much as unearthing long buried ones through an accumulation of little victories during the last six weeks. I had leapt from cliff-faces into green grottos, climbed volcanos in Havaianas and stared spell-bound at the turret-littered hillside of the Albanian ‘Riviera’. Solo travel was a revelation. I had backpacked in western Europe two years earlier with my best friend and a Eurail pass, but this was different. I wasn’t single then, simply sans partner, and I remained cautious and restrained. But this time I threw myself into the azure of that coast with caution newly abandoned and perhaps it was the thick saltiness of the waters of Capri and Pag, Dermi and Kotor, but I felt myself buoyed up each time, rising to a new and invigorated sense of myself.