Story 3 - The woods
My friend has never been the one to choose the easy way, the right boy or to sit through a song while all were dancing. I met her right on the verge of her truly reaching her potential. Also, she was absolutely lost.
Having both just started the most prestigious business education in the country, she and I often indulged in the game of who of us fit there the least and for which number of reasons. Going against the grain has been my friend’s specialty for decades, I very soon learned. In her hipster outfit, which managed to make her look very composed at the same time, disobedient fountain of curls falling down her back and that almost wild, untamed fire in her at the same time kind eyes, she marched right to me the first time we met. She poured a glass of wine at the table outside and her soul out. That August evening I learned more about her than I asked for, but very fast, she for a time became the centre of my universe and the measuring stick for most of my actions and the way I judged the world in its entirety and assorted parts.
In a way, friendships very often develop organically. Proximity to a kindred soul, shared interests and views on vastly crucial issues such as who the cutest boy in class was, or how to deal with the communist past of our country and lack of patriotism in our generation - these were the prerequisites for a potential friendship to blossom, I figured. However, different from the usual largely accepted social pattern, my friend and I startled each other, almost tripped over each other, when we met. We liked each other with the intensity only people, who see, finally, after years of searching, really see someone they want to listen to as much as tell something to, do. And tell we did. We had 24 years of events and feelings and revelations to catch up on. She had a lot of siblings she loved dearly and passionately, like she did all the people and things she cared for, so very quickly I felt for myself that she knew how to let people feel loved.
That autumn week exams were looming over my friend’s head and clouding her judgement of how well she was prepared. I gave up to even try to have any concentration with the flow of alcohol and new people in my life, but I knew that right before the exam, the nerves would get to me, and the right amount of studying would come. That was the moment she offered a trip to her parents. To a village next to Nijmegen. From our little castle of the university, surrounded by the 15th century walls, creating a little microcosm, oblivious to the world outside, a trip to Nijmegen seemed like a serious undertaking. Of course we went.
To study, to spend time together, and perhaps, if only for a few days, to plunge back to reality, see that people still breathe, eat and function outside our campus life.
Her parents’ house had high ceilings, like apartments in St.Petersburg, white walls, and large windows, which let so much sunlight pour through them that the furniture pieces seemed to glow. There was space to take up with our books and giggles, and air to breathe. My friend was known with her parents for bringing strayed kittens, recent boyfriends, or new friends home. For some time off, she would explain. Her Mom would never ask further.
Two days into the long weekend, we were so engrossed in the stats books and just as much bewildered by the amount of material we had to process, my friend had made a commanding decision to get out of the house and go for a run. Just around the neighbourhood she said. My friend is not someone who would do things halfway, half-heartedly, it is all or nothing for her. We made our way to the woods just outside of the village, slowly, mostly because we had my pace and ability to take into account, but meticulously forward, turning around not really an option in sight. She did a lot of things by feel, and that day, a long run seemed right. This is the way she’d lived, with a little compass inside her pointing at the direction of the right. Years would pass before she would start valuing making decisions and taking actions intentionally.
4,5 kilometres into the run, which we performed in a crazy serpentine form, distracted by a funky-looking tree or a tail of an animal or a group of out-of-place bright green parrots, we got hopelessly lost. In the woods she’d grown up in, used to know and recognise every stone, we could not find the direction towards the village. The wet air filled our lungs as we stopped to catch our breath and find our bearings. My friend wiped sweat off her forehead and looked at me puzzled. She was suddenly struck by the magnitude of how exactly lost she felt. Lost in life, which due to her parents zigzagged her through most contrasting countries, and due to her character, from one career path and study choice to another. She did not know where she wanted to go after the study, if the choices she had made prior were of any sense at all either. She recognised a strange taste in her mouth - of iron, as if of blood, and unsettling worry.
Both crouched over two large stones, we started talking. About the confusion so large, and encompassing, it got my friend lost, literally. She spoke for what felt like hours, and I sat motionlessly, as if worried to scare off her sudden clarity of mind. The more she spoke, the more structured her sentences became, and her stomach had stopped turning. She looked at me but she didn’t see a speaking partner, she saw a complicit to her revelation of structure and intentionality. Even if for a second, the unsettling, but of course so understandable, feeling of youthful confusion had given way to convinced vector of direction.
After a while we got cold, my friend called her Mom, and she picked us up based on our phone location. We sat in the car, cold to the bone, feeling our wet from sweat toes inside the hardened muddy shoes, and smiled at each other as if we had learned the secret of life in those woods, even if just for a while. Part of us also knew that in years to come, we would both go through similar waves of purposeful intentionality and make hundreds of big and small choices, and fall back into the abyss of being lost. Every time it would get easier to accept the state of it, and at last, we would learn to enjoy it, as I suppose it happens a lot once you get older.
We kept none of the promises we made that day, both to ourselves and each other. It did not spoil our trip one bit.
