Fate; une chose très étrange...
Met up with Jo/Reka from IT on Thursday. She's in Sydney for her cousin's wedding and a bit of a holiday. We grabbed lunch from Bourke Street Bakery and spent a lazy afternoon lazing about in Victoria Park. Sitting with our bodies in the cool shade while our feet played in the sunlight, we talked about... many things. Before meeting her, I was worried we would have nothing to say to each other. We were hardcore Arashi fans once, but that was many years ago and we've both moved on since then. We've kept in touch, but lead such different lives now, where to find some common ground? As it turned out, I really needn't have worried. From the first "Hi, nice to finally meet you!", the conversation just flowed. To this, I credit Jo's incredible personality. She is such a bubbly and fun person, I just fed off her energy. She asked me questions like she was genuinely interested in what I had to say and responded to mine with such enthusiasm and candour, it felt more like catching up with an old friend than meeting someone for the first time. I didn't feel afraid to speak about world politics or social decay, or inclined to stay silent rather than offer a contradictory view. Not that we disagreed on much, as I recall... which probably helped.
The truly, truly amazing thing though, is that we were able to meet all those years ago and become friends. That we were able to gather in the same place, at the same time, at the exact moment that both of us were at the height of our fangirliness. If either of us had been less fangirly, been active in a different forum or belonged to a different fandom, we may never have met. Contingent on all these ifs and maybes, how circumstantial some things in life are. Relationships, in particular, are so so delicate - not just the friendships we forge over the internet, but the people we meet in real life, the friends we make in school, the family we are born into and the strangers we spend a large part of our lives brushing shoulders with. Had we taken just one step to the left or one step to the right, strangers might have become friends and friends might have become strangers.
Such is fate.
The truly, truly amazing thing though, is that we were able to meet all those years ago and become friends. That we were able to gather in the same place, at the same time, at the exact moment that both of us were at the height of our fangirliness. If either of us had been less fangirly, been active in a different forum or belonged to a different fandom, we may never have met. Contingent on all these ifs and maybes, how circumstantial some things in life are. Relationships, in particular, are so so delicate - not just the friendships we forge over the internet, but the people we meet in real life, the friends we make in school, the family we are born into and the strangers we spend a large part of our lives brushing shoulders with. Had we taken just one step to the left or one step to the right, strangers might have become friends and friends might have become strangers.
Such is fate.