The name started as three words I liked together. Over time, I realized they were doing more work than that.

Wander

To move without needing every step mapped in advance.

I love an itinerary. I also know some of my best travel memories have happened when the itinerary collapsed, the train was late, the road curved somewhere unexpected or I simply decided to keep walking. Wandering, to me, is less about having no direction and more about leaving enough room for curiosity to interrupt the plan.

Lost

Not failure. Not incompetence. Not even necessarily a lack of direction.

Travel has a way of making the familiar temporarily useless. The social rules change. The language changes. Your sense of scale changes. Sometimes you are literally lost. Sometimes an old version of yourself is.

I am interested in both.

Noire

The Black point of view is not an accessory to this project. It is part of the lens.

I do not experience airports, borders, neighborhoods, hospitality, beauty, safety, belonging or being foreign from some neutral traveler perspective. None of us do. Wander+Lost Noire makes room for the fact that who we are travels with us.

That does not mean every story here is “about” race. It means I am not interested in pretending identity disappears the moment the plane takes off.

And the +

The plus sign may be the most important part.

Wandering and getting lost. Beauty and friction. Freedom and responsibility. Home and elsewhere. The version of a place we imagined and the one we actually encountered.

Travel writing gets less interesting when every experience has to resolve into one clean lesson. I am much more interested in the tension between things.

“The + is where the contradictions get to stay.”

Wander+Lost Noire is a travel journal, but the places are only half the story. I care about what travel reveals: about a destination, about power, about culture, about belonging, and occasionally about the person doing the wandering.

So that is the name.

Not a promise that I know where I am going.

More like permission to pay attention while I get there.