musing

right now i have no idea how many journal entries i have. i'm sitting with spencer and marielle in marielle's room and it's almost 2 AM. we just got our laundry. i am going to be More Thoughtful, partially because that's what's more important to remember in a while, and partially because spencer just read us some of his journal and i thought it was really good.

okay, here we go. they're writing down all of my silly quotes right now. waaaaaaaay back in richmond, in may or june or whatever, i remember looking around that classroom and wondering what would happen to all of us, and not really believing that in a short while we would all be stuck in close quarters together for a month in a foreign country. automatically bonded, like a family. i did not see any one person i was immediately drawn to as a potential Good Friend, or really anyone who i saw and thought looked particularly interesting.

in the beginning, i felt very surpressed by the personalities i was initially surrounded with. that is, jessica and anne, who are BFFs and have 'stronger' personalities than i do, and also justin and tony who kind of knew each other and anne from before. i felt like a weird parasite, especially being younger than all of them. i was glad to be included on that first night out on the 4th of july, but i was too quiet. i don't know why i get that way when i feel so comfortable around them now. it was only that first week i was so oppressed, before the melk/dürnstein trip. i think it was climbing up that mountain that broke down some barriers for me.

one of the most wonderful things about this trip has been how this random strand of people from my university (and a few others) is now definitively bonded. i would probably barely cross paths with any of them without this trip, and even if i did meet them somewhere we wouldn't become Friends under normal circumstances. Especially spencer and marielle, who go elsewhere, would carry their lives on completely independent of me and my life, not even slightly aware of my existence. then there's amber, whom i definitely would never would have met since she lives in germany. somehow it feels more amazing about the other americans, though, since it seems more magical that we all signed up, basically, to meet each other. the chances that, for example, me and spencer (who is from georgia) would ever meet under any circumstances are impossibly small! and yet, here we are, two meters away from each other in kandlgasse 30.

i'm glad i get to still hang out with most of them back in richmond. i want to, but i also know that these things sometimes don't happen. i know that i won't see a lot of them very often, no matter what our bond is here. i'm glad i got to meet them at all, and i hope that they take some part of me back too.