I dont remember when, but it was on one of our calls, my brother read this quote out to me: “we are all tourist’s in each others lives”. And its always stuck with me. Especially having moved around a lot of schools, places, it also meant navigating new relationships and leaving old ones behind.

If I look back and think of all the friend groups I’ve had and am a part of now, and how my identity has changed as I’ve shifted from each one. Think about how those relationships at the time felt so intense and as if this was all there was and will ever be. The inability to see forward and to only be able to connect the dots backward.

Moving around though, from weeks to years, has shown me that most if not all are just phases. We pass through each others lives like cars on a highway. some people get on and stay for a while in the passenger seat, some are short drives while others go on for very long, yet they’re all transitionory.

Maybe these are all excuses for my inability to keep in touch. But if so many people whine about not being able to keep in contact maybe it isn’t us that is lacking but just a way of life. I always feel a bit awkward when the friend group I am part of right now thinks that the relationship I have with them is going to extend beyond borders, beyond proximity.

And then I think of all my past interactions and experiences. Of the common experience of “moving on”. All interactions become sweet memories, nostalgia fills up even spaces which weren’t the best of the times to make them feel lighter and brighter. And I think its also beautiful how each of us leave a fragment of ourselves, a fragment of who we were at the time and space with all of these people. And how they become living artifacts for you just as how you become one for them.

I will always think of these people in certain moments, moments that seem completely detached from what im doin, things and stuff that don’t make logical sense. As I write this I think about all the people in my highschool, I think about Tris and how much of a role he played at the time I was in my pubescent years. I think of kurlean and how crazy it is that we are still talking and how we wil always remember each other in the frame of 2019, 3 months, intense. or maybe im the only one who does.

Writing this has gotten me soft, it fills my heart. I started this out today because I was thinking of my relationships. I just came out of one and I am thinking of how I was just another tourist in her heart. That stayed in the passenger seat bringing up intense emotions and memories in a short burst of time and how it was the same for me.

How although everything looks so big and important right now, in the time frame of life all is just beautiful. And all things will relate to each other and make sense once we finish connecting the dots. It is too bad that the connecting of the dots only finish when we do as well.

We become a tapestry of all the tourists we meet along the way, some fill up a bigger portion while others a smaller one. And so do we fill up the tapestry of someone else and we would never know how big or bright of a color we might be in the others tapestry.

I think we do not even need to have interactions with the other to be in their tapestry. Sometimes I randomly think of people from my college who I never talked to but who I distinctly remember from going to harris and I think for whom am I this person as well. Someone who doesn’t even know I exists, would never in their entire range of possibilities begin to think that I was thinking of them at that moment and in that space.