Retrospection

What a year it's been... I experienced a first 'relationship', and what's funny about romantically-involved relationships is how close two people get, but once it breaks, it is as though the two people in question never ever knew each other. Unlike friendship, there can be no mending. Once over, both parties separate completely. There are always exceptions to rules, so there may be some people managing to stay 'friends', but even that can only come some time down the road. In my particular instance, I'll never again hear from the guy... he was just another passenger on a train. We hooked up and spent some time together, and then one of us had to get off at some point - and we were never meant to get off at the same station.

Then I started my 'first' real job. You know, that 'real' job that involves the idea of 'career'. It took me some time to adjust to it, to say the least... but it's good for me. I spend my life living inside my head, so it's good to have to deal with the real world 5 days a week, 7 hours a day, excluding lunch time. I also like my job because everyday it reminds me that I can work anywhere so long as I learn self-discipline. Hopefully some day I'll be a good pupil and learn to be organised enough to never have to work in an office. But even if that doesn't happen, well... such is life, so it's alright.

I spent the night between the 24th and 25th drinking vodka and Diet Coke with my cousin, sitting opposite each other on the old sofas of the living room. After a while, we were both talking in our respective languages and the language barrier no longer mattered. I suppose we just understood whatever we wanted to understand as the other spoke. And there we stayed, drinking and talking nonsense till dawn. I was wearing reindeer horns on my head and he was wearing a green hat with the word ELF on it. The rest of the family had been wearing red Santa hats, but they'd collapsed in bed way earlier than us.

I realised fairly recently that the friends we make often happen to be a certain reflection of ourselves, and it's because we recognise a part of us in them that we become friends. I haven't made that many friends throughout my life, but the ones I did manage to make are truly a reflection of some parts of myself... We seem to have at least one thing in common: we don't fit in and we don't seem able to find our place in the world. There's my friend B, forever addicted to the internet world, rough on the outside but softer than a baby's skin on the inside... There's my friend S, who came to this country many years ago to help her family and try to make a better life for herself. But she remains just as lost as I am in this world, never finding her other half while she watches everyone else that she knows be pulled in, get married and have kids. As she works her ass off to send her family money, her mother keeps nagging her about the fact that she's a social loser - in the sense that she's almost 30 and has no 'situation' for herself. Nice, huh?

There's my friend A, whom I've known since I was 13. We only went to school together for a year, and then lost touch for over 4 years - until I moved here and decided to go look for her. And because I chose to look for her, we rekindled our friendship. But I remember why she never came looking for me... I had to be the one who looked for her because I had been the one to break the friendship when we were 14 and she had to leave... and I couldn't stand the loss. Four years later, I end up having a dream of her inside an empty train station, and that convinces me to look her up. She's the other dreamer, the one who never gave up no matter how tough reality has been on her. She's been in and out of various relationships, forever seeking herself. Now she's toying with the idea of leaving her 'safe' job to focus on her dream full time... and I am in awe at her courage.

These friends just happen to be passengers on a train who chose to sit down next to me for as far as our journey together takes us. But it was never about the getting on and off part of the journey - the fact that we all come and go in one another's life - it's about the connections, and ultimately the interconnection of absolutely everything. It's about realisation. Knowing that each connection made between stations had a particular significance to be realised in the moment or in retrospect.