tea with a stranger

I wish I had more interesting things to share about my life these days. I got a letter in the mail recently from a pen pal I met in Seoul that made me realize just how much distance there is between my existence now and that genuinely unbelievable month that felt like a divine intervention somehow.

I returned to my hometown and started an internship shortly after graduating, which has been going well. I make espresso for myself in the mornings with a machine my mother bought after our old coffee maker broke. RIP. I’ll always remember the comfort of coffee made from that machine, especially for my philosophy and economics exams in the mornings of 2020. Which was six years ago! Very obvious, yet somehow hard to grasp. Time flies.

A lot of things didn’t work out immediately postgrad that somehow I imagined would. I thought I was part of a friend group and arrived at the rather blunt realization I was not considered to be so. I honestly was not as sad about this specific situation so much as the pattern of relationships I’ve found myself in which involve a certain level of connection and consideration, but anything deeper than caffeine when bored is firmly denied. Both platonically and not.

Still, the recognition involved a bit of grieving that I didn’t know to brace for myself for. I’ll be fine eventually; I always am. There is just kind of a vague disillusionment that lingers which I suppose is part of growing up.

I read my older thoughts sometimes and remember how different life was before. I was more sincerely a nobody and I lived with the freedom of that. Now, people I don’t know well recognize me when out. There is a joy in feeling seen but also the heightened self-consciousness of being perceived. I sometimes wish I could return to the old nothingness when I never wondered how things would “look” to a public eye. That is what I have welcomed as someone who no longer just blogs for fun but now writes professionally, however. It’s an innocence I’ve forever lost and a requisite condition to writing hereafter.

Maybe because of this “eyes on me” feeling I haven’t blogged as much and have instead turned to other forms of writing that cover the people and places around me. There is only so much another wants to read about an inner self they don’t have access to; putting a material environment into words can feel much more real than voicing convoluted abstractions or mundane worries about being in one’s twenties, the geopolitical state of the world, et cetera.

So I think that is what I shall do a bit more of in the years to come as a supplement to further graduate study.

My mind drifts a lot these days to the wide variety of fascinating strangers I’ve met in the past few years and the insights they’ve shared with me. I ran into one of these inspirations recently at a tea shop and was both delighted and deeply surprised to reconnect, however briefly. To hear my name!

I hope we meet again when I have dreams from my daily life to share, not just images in my sleep. I was too stunned to say anything real last time.

There are too many people I hope this for. And yet, I really may not see them ever again. Or I will when I least expect it, because… life.

I cast away my thoughts and slip on my earbuds for a walk, away from my past and into the future, with all of its unspeakable promise and unknowable purity.

The direction is somewhere new, and yet it all somehow seems like a return.