I went home last weekend to surprise my mum for Mother's Day, and when I left, my mum said to me "For the first time, I feel like you've actually left home". I'm not entirely sure how it's taken her that long (or indeed how far away I need to go) for it to really sink in, but it got me thinking.
When I look back on the last few years, I really, honestly don't recognise myself. Three or four years ago, every single thing about my life was different, except for one thing. My friends. Back then, we spent every day together (even if I didn't technically know Lauren quite that far back, it feels like she's been my friend forever).
I mean, we're all different people. Becky can create beautiful art by simply picking up a paintbrush, and Charlotte can do the same with a pen. Zoe knows exactly how to capture a moment that will last forever, and Lauren chose a different path entirely. I know how humans acquire language, and how many morphemes make up a sound. And, you know, these are things that people can live without knowing. I don't need to know how a camera takes a photo; to my philistine mind, it just does. Becky and Charlotte make art and writing look so easy, though there's so much more to it than meets the eye. And we don't need to know how languages work in order to be able to speak them - we just can.
In the end, we all do the same thing. We know the intimate details of things to which most people don't give a second thought. That is what every human does; all of our interests revolve around the little components which make the big things work, and it's got me thinking about how things change. My friends and I don't see each other everyday. We don't even talk everyday. Now, instead of knowing all the little ins and outs of the other person's day, we only know the big things. Things are reversed now. But it doesn't matter, because even though we don't know all the details of the cogs that make the wheels turn, turn they do, and we're still close, almost two years after we all left for uni, even though we were warned that we'd drift apart.
I don't know where I'll be in ten years. Where I'll be, what I'll be doing, who I'll know. Hell, I don't even know where I'll be in three months. Doing an Erasmus changes you, and the idea of going back to my monolingual country and my monolingual, monocultural life just seems... flat. There's so much to be seen and so much to be done, but there's no point in any of it if there's nobody to see it and do it with you. Half the fun of this is sharing it with the people I love, and though I wish they were here to experience it with me, they're not. At least we have the internet, right?
Molly x
