Not that long ago…

It was around afterschool time; ~ 4:30pm - 5pm ish.

Mask on, I was sitting down on a sofa in Melbourne Central (a Mall), watching passerby. Our fourth snap-lockdown (COVID-19 lockdown) ended last night and so the city was getting full of people again. I just sat there. Just looking at shops and the people around me. No phone, nothing.

It was actually part of a light walk I went on to give my bad digestion a kickstart. I strained my left foot arch from running a little too much earlier in the week and strained(?) my mid- to lower- back quite badly somehow and was recovering from this too. Just a bit unlucky.

Some high school students sat down on the other side of the couches. Looking at them reminded me of the time I used to walk through the city in my final years of high school. I remember feeling anxious and happy at the same time.

Happy to be away from the desk from studying, anxious from feeling like I was taking my chances of getting into a decent university away from me by not studying.

It’s pretty funny thinking back to this but I remember being so in my thoughts, all serious about it. Kind of nuts to think that I’m living out alone in the city, about to finish my undergraduate degree now.

How I sat - with my thoughts

in Melbourne Central

Anyway,

after this thought, I went on my phone and saw that an old classmate I met online from a translation unit I took from last year happened to be in the mall as well. She came around to say hello. It was nice to meet her in real life after all the times we met in those online classes.

That led me to another thought: how it’s becoming a norm to meet people through a screen before meeting them in real life. It used to be more common to meet people in real life, then online even though this trend was changing to what it is now.

[Bourke Street Mall] Melbourne around 5pm ~ish at the moment (18 June)

After that, I walked home, stiff from my back pain, finished my day studying German with a can of beer.