It doesn't correlate

probably about a month before the summer trip - should've known that the t-shirt was some kind of a forecast...

"Si jamais tu viens à Paris..." a simple 20-minute conversation and an even simpler invite. I already feel like changing my plans all over again. A place to sleep in the 16ème; someone I only met once near the beach boulevards of Nice, suddenly willing to show me the parks and the fancy buildings of the neighborhood.

And for the first time in my life I felt a surrealistic, fleeting minute during which I wanted to phone someone whose last name I don't know, whose face I've almost forgotten and whose digits I definitely do not have, but with whom I briefly shared so much: alongside other things an encounter with this Parisian boy who lives in the 16ème.

I wanted so achingly to gush guesswhoinitiatedaconversationwithmejustnow to that half-stranger, like you do to your best friend when that annoyingly good-looking but brattish boy from that horrible bar last night calls you.

For a moment it felt like he would be the only one who would understand the thing completely and remember the oddly wonderful encounter in the nuit niçoise - the only one who would be able to laugh at it wholeheartedly for a moment and then look back on everything with fondness. And the feeling was true and right: he is the only one who would understand it as precisely as it deserves to be understood.

I quite obviously cannot phone him and it irrationally makes me want to cry.

The whole situation is nearly impossible to explain and translate into comprehensible and coherent text, but I just wanted to make a note-to-self to remind myself of this bizarrely wonderful moment when I realized a half-stranger on the other side of the world has a few memories that are replicas of mine.

It just feels surreal that one could be able to share such memories with a stranger.

And ladies and gentlemen, see - this is what traveling does to you: it does your head in, it spins you around, it plays games with your feelings, it confuses you.

And it gives you new friends who seem to stick by through months of not exchanging a word and who hold a hand out for you when you need it. And the other kind of friends, too, with whom you'll never shake hands again, but who stay with you, corkscrewed in your memories firm and tight, as to not get lost along the way.

(It's 1:36am now. Good night, sleep tight, try to stay loved and warm)