Talk

The exams are 3 weeks away. Yesterday I sat down outside the library with a classmate. When we entered our course, I discovered his affinity for studying, smoking and swearing. Since 2 out of 3 was not bad at all, we became friends.

He was prone to long bouts of fierce silence, and politics and fakery sickened him. No surprise then, why I think he sometimes detested me. He was imploding every day, and once, just before we drifted apart, he allowed me a brief, keen glimpse of his most inner thoughts.

It strikes me how someone so young, logical and perceptive can feel so genuinely numb about the future. Over the next 2 years we skirted the issue like true acquaintances: warily polite, always non-commital.

I had fallen short of something and turned away, while he, having managed to grasp it, realised how it was never worth having to begin with. Still, there is always empathy when you've run the same relay. And so yesterday, for 4 hours, for the first time in 2 years, we talked.