Well, maybe I do. And maybe I don’t. It was a rainy afternoon and long bus rides, especially during thunderstorms (even if it’s en-route to raiding another camp), never fail to be the perfect opportunity for some reflection.
Everyone’s asleep. The pervasive silence is punctuated by the noise of little droplets of rain pattering against cold glass, of the spray beneath the tyres, that hush - it lulls you into a reverie of involuntary inertia and pensiveness. I curl up on the seat and think. I thought about how disjointed it would all be - that dim old Mowbray Road I take to camp everyday - in a matter of months, I wouldn’t be walking on it anymore. Or driving on it. That asphalt will be 10,000 miles away, no longer under these dusty army boots of mine. Heck, the car I drive would probably be in the scrapyard by then, and where these boots I’m wearing will be then - well, my guess is as good as yours.
And Lord, it may be many, many years before I set foot in this country again. And that was when my heart experienced an unfamiliar yet all-too-agonising ache. I have a few weeks’ grace before this cozy home inevitably transforms itself into a storehouse of cardboard boxes, bursting at the brim; before I’m uprooted and have to leave the beautiful people and dear friends I’ve gotten to know behind; before I abandon all that is familiar to me. Perhaps a little too familiar.
Before I begin a new chapter in my life.
Never have I lived in one country for this many years at a stretch, and this sentimentality worries me. “You shouldn’t be feeling this way,” I’ve been told countless times. “You should be used to it - you’ve been doing it since you were born - literally,” they say. But I’m human, too, you know. Emotions and sentiments constitute my soul, the way they do everyone else’s. But mine have taken me over, they dominate, they reign, sie beherrschen. And this must not be.
Comfort is danger, inertia is poison. Routine is toxic, familiarity dulls. Pull yourself up and out, Niall. These chains must splinter. They must go. They tether you to the mundane, to the tedious, to the commonplace and the banal. My heart screams, “no”, my mind shrieks, “yes”. I am in conflict.
Perhaps it is time to treasure the mundane. One hundred days of monotony (and ordinariness) remain. Chapter 7 of my life begins thereafter. I desire it, yet I don’t. But I desire it nonetheless, passionately. And that desire shall suffice for now.
Chapter 7 will be brief - es wird kurz sein - just eight months short. And an even more exciting and trying journey will begin thereafter. But it shall soon be time for change for the better, and for inevitable change - change that is charging at me, raging by the minute, coming ever closer, closer, closer - for that change must I ever be ready.
