No, not just because of the internet. I am just the person I would like to be when I return & wake up in that place everyday. It’s hard to explain. Back home, I feel I’m meant to be a backup of who I used to be years ago. Breathing time-capsule air, living in an archive. I only do this for my mother, and my friends. I spent the last two days with the people I’m fond of from high school, they’ve flown all around the world and we only see each other a few times a year. Like last night, and lunch today.

I miss them, and we talk till we laugh till we cry, but for the most part, I feel lost. I don’t know how to talk about places they’ve traveled during hols, the amount of baggage-kilos they’re allocated, how to obtain the PRs they want, favourite seasons in favourite places, price conversions of things like movies and popcorn, encounters with various italian men, nightmare foreign housemates. Sometimes we reminisce about high school (that is usually what makes us laugh till we cry) but you can only flashback so far before deeper comparisons set in and it gets depressingly bittersweet.

Sometimes we talk about relationships, The Universal Issue. Something that unites us all immediately. The currency of hearts & the tricky economy of it all guarantees hours of late night talk.(last night I found out they called it ‘The Game’, and I couldn’t sleep afterwards, wondering if I had been unwittingly playing it all this time). I managed to speak here, sometimes, but sparingly. I’m tired of repetition, and the newer news isn’t something I’m ready to toss into the pool to make into a stereotype & emphathised with.

I think I am the most different of them all now, because of how little I’ve seem to changed. I have no foreign study-atmosphere that induces rapid change. In Australia, UK, US, God knows where else, they’ve spawned and overwritten and embellished and morphed. Back in our time capsule at home, reporting all the changes is an exhausting, enthusiastic act. I’d like to think I have something to report too, that I too have traveled worlds of change without ever having stepped into another airport. In the time they have left, I stayed, & surprisingly endeared myself to this city that they all escaped. That can take a lot out of someone too.

But I don’t say a word. It’s hard to join in the conversation. Besides, observing is more interesting. I love to see how they are, and being around them is comfortable & familiar regardless of the alien languages they speak.
Above all, they never asked me how I was, because there were just far too many stories of theirs to tell.

(what a relief).