Streams of consciousness are made of these...I remember my first day back at school there, though. I didn't know at the time if I was going to be able to stay in the country because I still didn't have a stable place to live in and my aunt had kind of dumped me in a hostel for the next 5 days. All I knew was that she was going to try and sort it out, somehow, but there was no garranty.
So I woke up the next day after spending most of the night crying my eyes out alone in that room. One look in the mirror made me cringe in horror: my eyes were of course swollen, puffy and red. I tried my best to conceal the damage with some make-up, got dressed mechanically, and with a map in hand made my way to that school, which was situated on the other side of the city.
When I arrived, I popped by the registration office where I was told where my first class was - as it happened the first class of the day was the literature one. I was already running late, so when I entered the classroom, all heads turned to stare at me at once... it felt a bit like in the movies, really. Or the zoo.
I took the first seat I could find and did my best to give friendly smiles all around. Of course the teacher asked that I introduce myself in front of everyone, so I did, and then I looked down at my notebook awkwardly.
After that class, it was time for the philosophy one, where I met one of the best teachers I ever got. Let's call him Mr V... A brash, outspoken middle-aged man who always wore red socks and who was never shy to remind everyone that he was a hard-core believer in communism - its essence rather than the way it had been implemented in reality.
That first week was rather stressful, in the sense that I had no idea if I would be able to stay longer... so it kind of prevented me from making any effort socialising with other students. I kept thinking 'what's the point getting to know anyone if I'm gonna have to leave at the end of the week?" By the end of that week, however, everything was finally sorted and I was able to stay for the whole of the academic year... but already people had begun to judge me based on first impressions, I suppose... and when I keep to myself, I seem to give off the impression of being aloof and arrogant.
One girl did end up approaching me rather quickly, though. Her name was the same as mine but we could not have been more different. Most of the kids in that school were either rich Polish ofsprings whose parents wanted to make sure they learned french fluently, or they happened to be the children of ex-pats.... People who worked in ambassies or ran big businesses away from home. This girl's mother happened to work in a French-speaking ambassy and they'd arrived in Warsaw a couple of years before me. She was well-integrated with other students but it soon emerged that she'd been falling out with people a lot in the space of those two years. Since I was the new one in town, she instantly approached me to start anew in terms of friendship, I suppose.
In a way, it was good that we met during that time, because without her I would really have ended up completely isolated. As soon as she learned that I lived in a hostel for young people studying away from home, she began to invite me to her place almost every weekend. That's when for the first time in my life I got to experience what it was like to live in a rather mainstream and 'conventional' family... Well, the modern type, really. Her mother was divorced and living with a new man and at the time they were planning to get married.
Her mother was so nice to me... And she was, I don't know... She gave off an impression of being stable and 'constant' - everything my own mother wasn't. We would spend our Saturday nights ordering pizza or KFC, and I would sit at their table feeling as though I was part of the family. The parents would then go out in town for the evening and me and my new found friend would hang around the house watching TV and chatting... when her boyfriend wasn't supposed to pop by for a visit. Everytime he did come, the same routine took place, really. She would disappear upstairs in her bedroom with him for a little while and then come down clearly looking like she'd just had sex. And then she would tell me all about it. That side of her fascinated me as much as it kind of put me off, in a way. If one was to make a generalisation, I suppose at the time I was playing the role of the quiet, brainy one while she played that of the superficial, sex-obsessed one.
One interesting aspect of being able to spend weekends at her more 'conventional' modern family home was that I got to observe how impressions often differed from the hidden reality - meaning that while families often try hard to give off an image of 'all is well' and 'everyone is happy', it only takes a closer look from the observer to start spotting the deep cracks.
So when I wasn't spending my time in the hostel among other young people I could never really talk to due to the barrier language, I was spending all my time with that new friend of mine. Whenever I was asked about my life back in London, I would make up stories. The last thing I wanted was for anyone to know the truth, mainly because it would have made no sense to try and explain. None of these people would have understood the chaotic and weird existence I had been leading for the past year or so. They were all immersed in their own little bubble of comfort and predictable lifestyles... The whole basis of today's modern way of life... and because they'd never experienced (yet) any real hardship in their lives, it made it impossible to expect them to be able to relate to my own experiences.
Well, one person did understand, and that was the philosophy teacher. And I'll never forget our last ever lesson with him. As we all sat in class for the last time, he glanced at all of us with a smirk and said something about how this year we had spent learning to think logically for ourselves would be lost in no time. He then went on to predict that all of us would be leading very conformist lives by the time we reached the age of 25... We'd all just fit in, get married, have kids, work hard for a career, etc... And while he said all this, the smirk never left his face.
That's when I got angry, mainly because I couldn't stand the thought of being told I was someone who would simply turn into a mindless drone. "Not everyone will end up like that!" I exclaimed, and most of the students followed to protest against his dismissive statement... But he just kept smiling knowingly and rolling his eyes at us. Then he met my hard gaze and nodded at me, looking amused. "Alright, alright. Perhaps not everyone," he agreed. "There can always be a couple of exceptions to the rule."
Well... he was right in his predictions, I suppose. My friend was married with a child by the time she was 23 and most of the others went on to build themselves a lucrative career of some sort that would have most of society nod and applaud with satisfaction.
But now I wonder more and more often: what was the point of being an exception to the rule when you end up paralysed anyway?
See these iron soldiers in the picture above? They looked stunning, watching them all the way from my bedroom window. One of the girls who shared a room with me in the hostel was a 17 year old who was said to be a little 'crazy' - mainly because unless she was constantly supervised, she wouldn't go to school or do her homework. She also had a habit of smoking weed from time to time, but at least she always made an effort to try and talk to me using the few words of English she knew.
One winter evening, and right after it had started snowing heavily, we snuck out of the hostel to wander about the streets together after smoking in the toilets. It was the first time I'd tried weed, and the last. I didn't care much about anything at the time, and I was curious. We walked about the deserted place giggling like crazy kids, and went to stand by these tall iron soldiers in the night... and the atmosphere suddenly turned mystical... eerie... surreal, even. I looked up at the huge iron faces and it was as though they were about to fall down on me to crush me with all their might. I grabbed the girl's hand and we started running away in the snow, laughing and panting, trying to 'escape' the iron men's grip... I could never forget that strange, unique evening in the night.
More often than not, I was alone wandering about the old town, though. I would throw away my books onto my bed in frustration, pick up my coat and rush outside to walk down the winding paved alleys all the way to medieval-looking ramparts... Or I would hop on a passing tram without a valid ticket to take me away at random... At some point I began to skip some classes, mainly history and latin, as well as sports. I would let my feet take me beyond the school gates without a glance back to wander about town some more... That's when I began to feel like a true drifter in this world... Surrounded by so many people, and yet alone always in my own head, my own universe within.
That one year in warsaw will always feel like a glitch in time, in a way... a dream-like experience that went by so fast that it left me dizzy for a while. Upon my return to England, I began to shut down completely. I didn't want to stay put, so I decided to attend a university outside London. The problem was that I had no idea why I was still alive. As far as I was concerned, now that I had finally left the realm of childhood, there was no longer anything appealing enough for me to keep existing. I didn't like adult life, never liked it. It had always felt like a prisoner's existence to me, caught up as everyone soon gets with endless expectations, a false sense of choice and random actions. I just couldn't see a point in anything whatsoever. No true point, no real direction that made profound sense... just an endless drift from birth till death. But at least as a child, I was allowed to believe in dreams... whereas upon entering adulthood, I was suddenly expected to leave all the far-fetched dreams behind to sink into society's own version of Reality.
I never liked it. I just... hated it.
The only thing that seems to make sense now is to try and follow my own version of reality rather than the imposed one. And never let go of dreams and ideals, but keep fighting the monster that tries so hard to take them away from us.
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