before sun...

so, despite telling dom I would wait until he arrived to watch the movies, I watched them tonight.It was fascinating.The first one was like 2003 in a nutshell for me.The movie, over one night, managed to culminate my year of travels, it covered my conversations, philosophising, my petty situations, my sudden and intense intimicy with people I had known for a matter of days. I was talking about this with Alice the other day. When you're travelling, you meet someone, maybe at a hostel, maybe in a bar. But you have a chat. You exchange stories. As long as you get along, suddenly you find yourself with more in common than anyone else around. You both speak english, you've both been to greece in the past few weeks, you both in the same town at the same time for a certain amount of time. In travels, that's enough to launch a friendship that allows you to discuss your biggest fears. It lets you put down your defences. For some reason, having a passport as your only form of ID makes you able to freely express your opinions and ideas. You tell stories that you'd never go into with someone you weren't best friends with, let alone someone you'd known for a matter of hours in some cases.You sit at a bar, you have a drink, a few laughs, next thing you know, you're extending an offer to go back to the hotel for a drink once the bar closes or to meet up and go to the beach the next day.This doesn't happen in the real world. When you're travelling you seem to bypass everything. You're living in a world where everything is spur of the moment, everything is new and incredible, your senses are overrun with unfamiliar information. You don't know anything for certain. You don't know anyone entirely. All you are is what you present yourself to be. Everything you've ever used for support is so very far away. so every little decision you make is new and so appears to be more risky. Every person you meet you know equally well. There is no one you can organise to meet and catch up with that you've known your whole life. Noone knows your history and everything you experience you take away knowing that you have a unique perspective and that you really don't have any idea how anyone else will see it. I remember travelling with dan, his friend we visited in Crete mentioned he thought the kind of relationships you form whilst travelling are so superficial. I feel the complete opposite. when you meet someone under those circumstance, they are the only person you know. You can stop and spend time on petty little details, or you can launch directly into what is important to you both. Find common ground, argue, probe, test the waters, find out who you're dealing with. And then you can share some of the most awe inspiring moments of your lives together. You may never ever see each other again and you may never know what that person is like in day to day life, but why should you? You know them inside out for those moments. If you share 4 days together, for those four days, they are the person you know best in the world. Once those days are over, you both cease to exist. In a way, you can't know someone unless you're with them. As soon as you're apart, they could, become someone completely different. So how can you ever really know someone.It's exhausting, travelling. It's exhausting to do that every day. In day to day life you meet too many people and there aren't enough individual characteristics about most people to make them stand out enough for us to make that investment.I can't believe how much I knew about the people I travelled with. Not about their past, but about their present. About how they slept, what they ate, how they moved, their expressions on their faces. For me every place I went to is now irreversibly connected to the person with whom I visited it. If I met these people in their home life, I'd probably be very disappointed, but there isn't a single one of them I wouldn't meet up with to travel again.Conversely, there isn't a single place that I wouldn't want to go to and meet a random stranger and for a new place related friendship. There are blurred lines for me, between the people I met and the places I saw with them. Katharina and Barcelona, Corsica and Stephane, Greece and Dan, Brindisi and Maurizio. Jess is latin dancing, Claire is the catacombes. The places and the personalities become one another.The second movie I haven't got to yet. I haven't given up on life, or love, but then I made sure we exchanged emails and made sure that we would see each other again. That doesn't mean that it will necessarily work out, but so far, in my life, there has not been one single person that I look back on and think, "what if...?"I hope that I can keep this theme for the rest of my life.Do you think it's better to have friends that are so ingrained into your life, that you know everything about them, so it's never new, but you can imagine them into every situation, or to be continually meeting a new best friend every day. Being continually surprised and enriched, but in a way, never really being known yourself. Maybe that's what they mean by shallow, not that you don't know the person, because obviously, right there are then you do. You can only ever live for the moment, but I know that when the day has been long and hard, all you really want is someone who not only accepts your sulks and mood swings as part of who you are, but maybe who understands why you are reacting the way you are. someone with a bit more history. So no it's not surprising, but yes you can take comfort in knowing that they were there when the thing that is making you feel crap now actually happened. They know how to snap you out of it, or how long you'll be like that.I hope I strike a fine balance between these things. I want to live experience, meet new people, be larger than life. But at the same time, I want to have those people who've been there the whole time, who didn't need to be beside you to understand why you felt the way you did. Who, just by you being somewhere, in a way, you've taken them with you.ok.that was long and rambling.I apologise