I'm a girl. This journal is almost 10 years old, when I started it, I called it Almost 21. Before that, I had a journal called Soap on a domain that no longer exists. Some things have changed since then, some things haven't. I always wanted to be a writer. I live out that dream here.
They're not.
I should have realised this on the first day back at University, when Nikhil was the first one of my friends that I saw. This was a sign in itself: everything is going to be okay! it screamed, only I didn't hear it because I was nervous, and guys wearing green shirts were disorienting me.
Back in the first year days, The Green Shirt was Mike's trademark. Green-shirted guys everywhere would make my heart jump. It was very rare, back in those days, that the green shirted guy that my eyes had chanced up would actually be Mike (at the time I didn't know where he spent most his time, and would go without seeing him for weeks on end. This disturbed me, a little.), but sometimes, I was lucky.
It wasn't the green-shirted guys that lead me to believe that things weren't going to be okay, though.
Walking to see if I could log into the computer labs (the walk itself was somewhat saddening - walking down the hall I remembered the many times I had walked down this same hall with the sole purpose of visiting Mike in his office), I sighted a guy coming out of the double doors that lead to Mike's office.
He was wearing blue and yellow board shorts, like Mike. A yellow t-shirt, like Mike. And he was coming out the same doors that I had so often encountered Mike coming out of. It was like seeing a phantom (only he was a lot taller). His appearance had me briefly shaken, and later, sad.
Today, as I sat in the bar drinking cold beer while Rowie told me about his woman problems, I realised that the three things that had frightened me most about coming back to university would not be a worry at all.
Yes, perhaps I would miss Mike for brief periods occasionally, but eventually, I would get over it. His absense from the university would not make me miss what I once had with him any more, or any less.
Yes, Boy will no longer be around to have lunch with, or to lie in the park with, or to catch the bus home with - but I am confident that this will not drive me into the state of depression I feared it would.
Yes, things have changed. But the change is almost refreshing: this is not the change that has had me crying for the past week, and now I wonder what it was that I was crying about.
Finishing my third glass of beer, I told the boys I was going home and left the bar to walk to my bus stop.
Alone.
It was like being in second year again: before the involvements with Mike and Boy, when I would spend all my afternoons after lectures in the bar, and walk to my bus stop, alone and uncaring. Not happy... but not sad.
Just being.