The comfort of strangers.

I met a stranger on a train and found myself in the unusual position of narrating my life to this person.

My thoughts, my embarrassments, my little victories and tepid regrets. My life, as I remembered it, my life without corroboration, without affirmation, free from outside embellishment and only as I remembered it. It was my life all the same, and who's to say that the punctures in my memory did not reflect the validity of the actual account? The actual account. It bounced around in the back of my head, dislodging other impertinent thoughts and leaving a vacuum in its wake. It stirred up a couple other dormant recollections, eventually easing itself to the front of my brain. Another manufactured memory, another untraceable account, answering only to its maker, its embellisher, and its embellisher realises that he has already forgotten the lies he told.

All I ever do is think soulful thoughts on long grey trains I thought to myself soulfully as I sat across this stranger on the train. The stranger listened, with what seemed like intent, with what seemed like vague interest in the volubility of my accounts. I've often wondered why I glean so much comfort from strangers and I have come to the conclusion that it must be due to the unreliability of friends. Friends are great of course, some you love more than yourself even, but friends betray impartiality almost all the time. Their eyes turn, their pupils contract and dilate as they chew on every word you feed them, your version becomes their version even before the sentence has left your lips. A statement as bold as this on the nature of friendship is not without repercussions and I already feel the pangs of cowardice stirring inside me. How sad it is to gain comfort from strangers when all you're really running from is the familiarity of friends.

Objective memory. The more I think about it, the more mythologized it seems to be. After all, objective memory stems from objective truth and the more I search for the truth the more I find myself grasping at straws to build straw foundations. Perhaps it is meant to be grasped at and never fully obtained. It sounds a lot like knowledge but with the marked difference that the procurement of memory does not enlighten, in fact it does the opposite, it blankets you in the darkness of your own inadequacy. All I ever do is think backward while I move forward I thought to myself as the train hurtled along an unknown route towards an unimportant destination. It is said that character solidifies between your twenties and your thirties. How ironic then, that as your character solidifies your memories become more and more soluble as you try desperately to anchor them to an ever inflating sense of self.

The train stops and I bid the comfort of this stranger goodbye. Strangers have no baggage, no obligations attached to them, strangers are whom we seek when the company of friends is stifling and the thought of being alone, unbearable. I walk along the pier as concrete floods my brain, seeping through the thoughts and memories which have so burdened me and replacing them with a lobotomised serenity. All I ever do is take soulful walks along the pier I thought to myself soulfully as I walked unhurriedly down the pier.