I am in a nostalgic mood today. The pandemic has forced me to stay at home, looking at old photos and listening to old songs. Somehow my mind got back to my high school days, about 12 years ago.
To be very blunt, I was terrible at Literature in school. I was not embarrassingly bad, but reading literature or writing essays bored me easily, and I often found myself falling asleep through most of it.
But there was one morning my teacher asked a question I've never stopped thinking about.
"What makes a song good?"
The class argued. She let us go back and forth for a while. Then she said, quietly: "A good song is one that fits your mood."
That's it. That's the whole thing.
When a song finds you at exactly the right moment, it stops being just music. It becomes proof that someone else, somewhere, felt exactly what you're feeling, and made it through. That you're not as alone as you thought.
My mind went back to a Sunday in the middle of summer. The soundtrack of the animated movie Spirited Away aka One Summer's Day kept playing in my head and I've now started to wonder.
There is a story deep inside my heart. So far away, but I will never forget.
Summer days like this one. Roads I wandered without knowing where they'd take me. Wind. Gold light on everything. The feeling that life was enormous and I was only just starting to understand what I was doing in it.
I am wondering how many moments like that do we actually get to live? Really live, not just scroll through. The world is going up and down. I am new to the city of Munich, trying to figure out my next steps.
When I close my eyes, it's there: the road that's taken me to you.
I close my eyes and you're still there. The road was never the point. You were. And that's okay. Feelings are allowed. Writing them down at 11am on a random Sunday is also allowed.
Thank you for being my most beautiful memory.
Never regret. Don't forget each precious thread of that summer's day.
And then I open my eyes. My Sunday is still here. Ordinary. Almost unglamorous. The lone wolf gets up and makes coffee.
This is my fourth summer in a foreign country. The adrenaline has faded. The novelty has worn off a bit. Some days I look at the life I chose, actually chose from scratch, and genuinely wonder: was this right? Where does all of this go?
And then I sigh. Not from defeat. From the kind of uncertainty that comes right before something clicks.
I don't have answers. But I have this morning. This coffee. This song on repeat. And this quiet, stubborn hope that the road still has something worth walking toward.
Stay focused. Stay hopeful. Keep going.