So, you have this great, big train station. When you first arrive through its gates, you know you\u2019re in for a lot of waiting. And very few people, I think, would spend the entire wait staring at the clock. If the conditions are right, or if you\u2019re the sort to do so, you may strike up a conversation with a stranger next to you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You talk. You find points of connection. You find you relate over shared experiences\u2013you\u2019ve both been struggling with the chaotic lockdowns, it\u2019s hard to find work in this city at this time, and this person is on their way to the suburbs to see family\u2013and you maybe do, on some level, bond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But eventually, they leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is the foundational fact of you being at the train station. You\u2019re there to leave. Everyone <\/em>is there to leave. If you weren\u2019t going elsewhere, then you wouldn\u2019t be there at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their train pulled into the station long before yours, so they\u2019ve left. And you\u2019ll never see them again. But that doesn\u2019t mean that your conversation with them wasn\u2019t worth the time, or meant nothing, or that you could just as easily forget you ever talked. More likely than not, you\u2019re still lingering on the details of that conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, if you look around you\u2019d find\u2026there are always people coming and going, alighting and boarding. The populace of a train station never remains the same for long. And every single one of them brings as rich an internal life, as rich a history, as the person before. While every single interaction will be irreplaceably unique\u2013that\u2019s the wonder of human bonds\u2013there\u2019s always<\/em> a life past each goodbye. Always more people arriving in the station, and you don\u2019t know their stories yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I first started thinking this way when I was dealing with the worst of my grief about my breakup. His family was family to me. His mother especially. She fed me through the first year of my arrival when I didn\u2019t know how to cook, bought me winter-wear when I didn\u2019t have the experience to handle it. She let me call her mom. We connected so easily, we played silly time-wasting mobile games together, and it was the first time I\u2019d felt loved by a parental figure. The first time I truly <\/em>got it, how good it felt to be loved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She hugged me and let me cry into her shoulder the day my ex broke up with me. She invited me to her home again 3 months later. But my friendship with my ex inevitably decayed, till it became too hard to return to those spaces. And with it, I lost her, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How was I supposed to reckon with being cut off from that love so suddenly? In that period, and even now, I question if I could ever form a bond that felt so irreplaceably special again. I\u2019ll never get back what I lost, and I know it\u2013no relationship is replaceable. I still cry about it. I find reminders everywhere, all the time, of how it felt to be so loved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in the past year, somehow, I\u2019ve made new friends. Friends who talked with me on the riverside till midnight, friends who got wasted with me and let me crash their place for the night, who performed music gigs with me, who send me music recommendations at random, who celebrate my joys with me. I fell in love with new people. People fell in love with me. I finished stories, I started new ones. I renewed old friendships and found I could relate to them in new ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They\u2019re not filling the hollow of what\u2019s gone, or burying it. They\u2019re more like\u2026the vines that grow over the remains of a grand and fallen tree. You\u2019ve still got the wreckage everywhere, and it\u2019ll be there for years to come\u2013and everything that comes after grows around and into the shape of what lay there before. But boy, is it gonna grow<\/em>. Maybe not all at once. Maybe just a bit of grass. But you don\u2019t know when passing animals are gonna deposit seeds there. And something about knowing it could <\/em>happen\u2026something could <\/em>grow\u2026it makes it worth carrying on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, I think I am able to believe, now, that my ex and his mother and his sister are not the last people who will ever love me like family. I think that each person who\u2019s talked to me\u2013in times of joy, in times of crisis\u2013has carried a similar light, though in a different hue or brightness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, we\u2019re all here now. We\u2019re going somewhere, and we don\u2019t know where that is. That\u2019s the foundational fact of us being here. But yeah, we\u2019re all here,<\/em> in this big train station, together, right now, waiting. And we don\u2019t all have to spend it staring at the clock.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, you have this great, big train station. When you first arrive through its gates, you know you\u2019re in for a lot of waiting. And very few people, I think, would spend the entire wait staring at the clock. If the conditions are right, or if you\u2019re the sort to do so, you may strike […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,24,25],"class_list":["post-549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-biographical","tag-non-fiction","tag-prose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":553,"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circlejourney.net\/writing\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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