kindred spirit

And as we talked, I saw how the likeness of ourselves were mirrored in each other. But you were better than me, a dreamer, someone who was spontaneous and kind and far braver than myself. Unlike me, you were not content with languishing in a cesspit of stagnancy, you acknowledged the need for change, for reinvention of oneself. You didn't have to delve deep into yourself, scour murky depths in order to locate the words- they came naturally to you. You didn't choose to close yourself off from the world, or remain indifferent, you didn't pull away when people tried to reach out for you. You were always on the search for beauty, carefully gathering them up in your hands like fistfuls of stardust.

We shot what we could, falling into an easy rhythm of silence before resuming our conversation, all the while looking into different directions, needing different things for ourselves. You looked more closely, breathing life into inanimate objects with your pictures. While I scavenged for scraps of stories, through the old men hunched over the table playing chess, through children who played in the shadows of their absent parents, through the pair of teenage girls walking side by side with all the confidence their youth granted them, through the office workers waiting outside the bank, through a mirror image, only now there were older folks lining up at the 4D counter, clinging on to the 1 in 75 million chance of hitting the jackpot because to think otherwise would be to forsake hope itself.

Some things we talked about:“sometimes I wish we could do away with small talk altogether”“call me idealistic but there's a romance about Europe you can't find elsewhere” “I like intellectuals, people who think about life" “I wish life would slow down a little” "let's learn to be less afraid” 

the resemblance in our thinking is uncanny