It truly is incredibly just how many people come in and out of our lives. Day to day, we don’t notice it. Because the people that are in our lives right this second, are the ones who we focus on. But looking through old photographs and spending some rainy days huddled under an umbrella on memory lane, I look back and wonder how I let all those people go. 

I grew up singing a song that went like this 

Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver and the other’s gold

But how are we supposed to keep all these wonderful people in our lives. Is there a limit to how many people we can keep close? I feel like the older I grow, the more incredible people I welcome into my life, but the more people I lose. And usually it’s not until years later that I reach out my hand to find that they had disappeared from my life months before, without my even noticing. To be completely honest - some of the friendships I have lost are nothing more than good riddance, but sometimes I look back and miss someone so much I almost pick up the phone and call them. Sometimes that person is someone I haven’t even given a second thought to in 10 years. But then stop myself and make myself trust that everything happens for a reason. That everyone walks out of our life to make room for something bigger. Someone better for us. The relationship served its purpose, and it finished for a very definite reason. Maybe it finishes so it doesn’t get destroyed. So we can remember it and smile and remember that person with warmth. I wonder if those people from my past ever think about me. Ever long to spend time with me. Or am I looking at it through rose glasses. Is it not that simple. Is it darker than that.

And I wonder who, from my life now, in ten years, will be one of those people I bump into on my morning strolls down memory lane. 

2nd Feb 2011

I’m not exactly sure why I cried at the Moulin Rouge. I was so excited. When the girls and boys filled up the stage in their shiny silver hot pants and caps for the opening, I was overwhelmed. A lump burst in my throat, my eyes welled up with tears. Watching girls my age, from my city, up on stage on the Moulin Rouge, I let two humble tears fall down each of my cheeks. I could have cried more. A lot more. But I let the emotion fill me completely, and then swallowed it hard. To be completely honest, I can’t even name the emotion. And I still am trying to figure out why I cried in Paris. I had always been a huge fan of the Blockbuster Hollywood film Moulin Rouge, and I watched a documentary with my parents when I was 10, about a few Australian girls who moved to dance in the Moulin Rouge in Paris. And since then, I wanted to dance at the Moulin Rouge. It was one of my very many dreams. Unfortunately I wasn’t blessed with long slender limbs, and my poor attempts at the auditions were all but humorous. I simply wasn’t tall enough. No training, no diets, no wishing or dreaming..nothing could change that cold hard fact. When I arrived in Paris, I fell in love with the city as soon as I stepped off the metro. Sitting in the audience at The Moulin Rouge was heartbreaking. Maybe I have over thought those two tears.

Maybe not

I think it was a mix of things. Firstly, the realisation of an unachievable dream being presented so close to me. Seeing girls that I recognised on that stage, performing, getting the chance to dance and live in Paris. I have never been so jealous of anybody before. And then the brutal realisation of the unspectacular nature of it all. Of the ordinarity of something I had expected to be so much more. Don’t get me wrong the show is brilliant…the choreography and the talent of the dancers however…well, lets just it was a little less than I had expected. Less than what my years of dreaming had fabricated. And knowing that my height was maybe the only thing that stopped me. That was devastating. Seeing the dancers little jokes and giggles onstage, seeing some of them love it, and others bored out of their brains, seeing these girls up on that stage who were my age, somewhat made the whole experience a little less glamorous. Knowing that could have been me, made it less special. Less huge. They pulled faces at each other from side stage and rolled their eyes as they turned their backs to us…I saw it. All of it. As a performer, it’s easy to pick up on these things, coz they are what we do in rehearsals and on stage when we have performed something a thousand times before. It’s how you keep it interesting. It’s how you stay sane. And even though we were a thousand miles from where I came from, in a land where their language sounded like bubbling champagne (as my father described it), I somehow had expected something different. But I guess dancing is a universal language. Dancers are the same, no matter where they come from, especially the performance etiquette. I’m not sure if I am explaining myself very well. I guess it was just my realisation that there is something ordinary about dreams. A dream you have had since you were ten years old and then you turn 21 and see that dream, you feel that dream, but somehow it was so much better when you had dreamed it. I guess what it really is, is reality. Dreams are always so much better than reality. And the reality of seeing something that I had drawn up so beautifully in my mind, was special…but also heartbreaking. Those girls had been given the opportunity to live in Paris. And how I would have killed for that opportunity. I have never felt like that about anywhere before. But I could live in Paris. I can see myself in Paris. How I loved Paris. 

Time is such a funny thing. We spend so much time waiting for something to happen, planning, looking forward to something. Then one day we wake up, look back on the time we spent waiting, and realised all that we have missed. And it hits us. So hard in the chest that it’s hard to breath. We look through all the photos of the moments we didn’t appreciate, and wish we could somehow rewind time. We spend our lives trying to get through school, rushing to get a degree, trying to desperately find the loves of our lives that we lose ourselves in the rush of it all and wake up one day to realise all that we have lost in the whirlwind of it all. All that we have sped through, all the years that we have wasted. I don’t want that to happen anymore. I look back on the 22 years of my life and wonder how it happened. How I have lived for 22 years when it feels like I was only born this morning. Days seem like years, hours seem like weeks but somehow these hours and days squash into years that flash by, too fast for us to grasp. We spend years rolling our eyes at our parents talking of the “olden days” and scoff, thinking that will never happen to us. And in that moment, it never will. But years on, all those moments have passed us by. The ordinary daily pleasures will one day, be a distant memory, replaced by new joys. At 16 we hate sitting through maths class and try not to fall asleep, but now at 22 - what i would do to be back there, sitting with my friends, passing notes, learning about things I have completely forgotten now. Catching the bus home, having afternoon tea and watching television with your family. How simple things were back then. How complicated I think things are now. But I know that one day, 20 years from now, I will look back at my life and say, what I would do to be back there. So here’s to not wasting any more moments. Here’s to making the most of every second. Here’s to trying to freeze time. Here’s to realising what we have, what we’ve lost, and enjoying the now.