This summer so far has been a bit of an emotional roller coaster. You know, the good thing about all this social networking and globalisation and connecting with people all over the world is, well, you get to connect with people all over the world. The bad thing is, they’re nowhere near you. So on rare occasions, you take a trip to actually meet your Facebook friends in person. Which is a wondrous, amazing thing for me – I’m usually shy and socially awkward, but if you’re used to chatting with those same people every day anyway, and you’ve already established that awkward is something that applies to them in very much the same measure, suddenly it becomes very easy. You swap the screen for the real person, and you just pick up where you left off online a few hours ago, and you instantly hit off and feel comfortable and at home and…that’s your problem right there. Because you only have a few hours, or maybe a day or two, and then you have to leave and there’ll be thousands of miles between you again. You can’t go to the movies with them tomorrow or have a coffee the day after.
Meh.
Anyway, here’s a poem I wrote about all that.
*****
Goodbye Stranger
I leave reluctantly
thinking
fearing
knowing
that I have forgotten something
but then I realize
I’ll be all right
it’s just a piece of my soul
which shatters every time I say goodbye
soon there’ll be pieces of me
scattered along every road
and all the way across the ocean
*****
But enough with the melodrama. I’ve also seized a bit of time to take a few more pictures, so maybe have a look, some of them aren’t too bad. Hope you’re enjoying summer, wherever you are!
Angelika Rust 