Some journeys begin when you book the tickets. Others begin much earlier, the moment someone writes in the group chat: “What if we just went?” Then come the impossible diaries, shifts, parents, children —grown now, yet still calling as though we know where everything is— and our remarkable talent for finding five reasons why this is not the right time.
This time we said yes. Four friends, one weekend in Ibiza and a simple promise: not to organise the joy out of it.
We arrived carrying more than hand luggage
I packed two dresses, comfortable trainers, a lipstick I keep buying in the belief that I will wear it more often, and a small piece of guilt folded between my clothes. The guilt of leaving and not being essential to anyone for a few days.
It did not last long. Perhaps until our first coffee by the sea. Or until one of us announced, “I am not asking anybody what they want for dinner all weekend,” and we fell into the kind of laughter that only happens among women who understand one another’s tiredness without an explanation.
He texted: “Have the best time.” No schedule, no interrogation, no turning my getaway into a test of love. I liked him even more for that.
A tiny flower among the stones
On a walk through a dry, golden landscape, one of my friends found a cluster of minute white flowers. They were not spectacular. Nobody would have paid admission to see them. Yet there they were, growing through stone, as if they needed neither permission nor perfect conditions.
We passed them from hand to hand. Our hands told our age more honestly than any document: rings we had chosen ourselves, travel bracelets, little marks, lived-in skin. For too many years, I thought, we had confused being strong with enduring everything. That flower suggested something else: seeking the light, making room and opening when you can are forms of strength too.
A sea large enough for every version of us
At the cliff edge we turned our backs to the camera and opened our arms to the Mediterranean. There was no rehearsal. One wore her hood up, another held her hat, another her unruly hair, and all of us carried stories that did not show in the photograph.
There had been divorces, career changes, children building lives of their own, parents beginning to need us differently, bodies that had changed and loves that arrived when we thought the script was finished. But for that moment none of us was “someone’s mother”, “someone’s ex”, “someone’s partner” or “the one who always sorts it out”. We were ourselves. That was enough.
We do not travel to become who we used to be. We travel to remember that we can still be many things.
Friendship after forty
Adult friendship does not always have room for two-hour phone calls. Sometimes it lives in a voice note heard three days late, a heart sent at midnight or the friend who arrives carrying a bag when everything falls apart. It does not require daily contact, but it does require truth.
In Ibiza we talked about the serious and the ridiculous: desire, menopause, money, impossible dates, songs that still make us dance and the relief of no longer needing everyone to like us. We took flattering photographs and dreadful ones. We ate without negotiating every bite with the scales. We got a little lost, and nothing terrible happened.
We also shared silence. That is one of the luxuries of real friendship: looking at the horizon together without feeling obliged to fill it with words.
Coming home without being quite the same
I did not return transformed. Inner journeys are often marketed more dramatically than they happen. I came back with sand in my trainers, unanswered messages and the same Monday waiting for me. But something had shifted.
I remembered that having a life of your own does not compete with love, family or responsibility; it makes them more honest. Missing someone can be beautiful when it does not mean disappearing from your own life. And four women opening their arms to the sea are not running away from anything. They are celebrating that, after everything, they are still here.
Perhaps that was Ibiza for us: a tiny flower among the stones, a weekend without asking permission and the certainty that lightness does not belong to your twenties. It belongs to anyone who still dares to open her arms.