Everything has changed

The winds of change have been billowing and I’ve caught a draft in my chest that feels oddly like heartache.

One piece of advice that I have received post-high school is that it’s so easy to lose contact with your school friends. I retaliated with, “No. Never. Not me and my friends.” It’s true and I see it now. Life get in the way and soon there is too much time and distance separating you that you become strangers.

School might have symbolized control and confinement but it also served as a community which united even the most unlikely souls. I attended an all-girls’ school pledged to diversity and among my own friends we had the most delicious variety.  It kept break times at the bench buzzing with a zealous zing. We learned a lot about others but more so about ourselves as individuals, our likes, aversions, talents and weaknesses while establishing a connection with people who fell outside our comfort zones. Then school finishes and each of us pursues a path that leads us away and astray from those who wear the missing halves of our BFF bracelets.

Last weekend I sat a table with my friends and their new friends and the conversation centered on concepts and company that were not my concern.  That day I could find cracks through which to chip in but what about two weeks, two months, two years, twenty years from now? Those exact people who could predict my every reaction won’t even be able to recognize my face and vice versa.

Mutual experience binds people in ways that cannot be understood by those who were absent, however what happens when new endeavors and excitements exceed old ones? What happens when the clock strikes midnight and you’re still stuck at midday?

I am nostalgic for times past and although this reality is saddening I am comforted by the fact that some friendships were destined to outlast and outlive the average expectancy. Those who stay are meant to stay and those who leave must move on and away in order to prosper. For some that means no contact for several months and then a reunion that feels like as though nothing’s changed.

Despite that everything has changed.

_Quixotic Novelist

We wait for trains that just aren’t coming

On January 6^th, I along with many others departed from a ride we had been on for twelve years. We each held a freshly printed matric certificate and a ticket that specified our preferred field of study, employment or occupation. When I glanced down at my own it read: “Destination: unknown.”

There was the hurried hustle and bustle of the busy train station. Somewhere a whistle blew. Ticket sales were closed and luggage was lugged languidly. My ticket did not contain so much as a date or time save for those two daunting words. I felt a strong similarity to Harry upon his arrival at platform 9 ¾ .I came close to running face first into a brick wall in the hope that the Hogwarts Express may await me in steaming esteem.

Time passed and I immersed myself in the luxury of good literature.

When I lifted my head and gazed around me. I was alone. Everyone I knew had disappeared into the destination of their ambitions. From time to time their trains would whizz by but before I had a chance to lift my hand in a wave they were gone.

It is two months into 2015. My dilemma is that I’ve become a wallflower seated upon a train station bench as all those who made up the members of my life hopped on trains headed in different directions. Perhaps the predicament is that while I’ve been sitting around, waiting for trains that just aren’t coming, I hadn’t realized that I was the possessor of a plane ticket and soon I’ll be flying off into the sunset of my vocation.

Watch this space.

_Quixotic Novelist