It’s a quiet Friday morning. I’m sitting in a friend’s lounge in Grahamstown. There are clouds in the sky. Perhaps there will be some much-needed rain later. The flowers bob in the breeze outside. I can hear birds singing. It’s gentle. Grahamstown can be so gentle. This is not the Grahamstown of my student years. Nor is it the buzzing, almost-overwhelming ArtsFest town. Visiting here in the past couple of months, I’ve become more and more comfortable with that. I don’t need this to be a place of nostalgia. At least for the moment, this is somewhere I come to visit friends.

I spent last night on a friend’s couch. Nothing dramatic about that. And yet, when you’ve been so far away, there is. Not that I didn’t meet people and have amazing times in Korea, but it’s different with old friends. There was a discussion about it in the crazy week we’ve just returned from – a week of working together. It is always more fun to work with someone you know. It hasn’t always been plain sailing. There have been times we have disagreed. There have been times when we were barely speaking. There have been times of tension and times of fear and times of joy. This particular friend is one of the  reason I managed to get on that plane to leave the country and one of the people with whom I shared that amazing trip to Mozambique.

I’ve never been very good at being completely comfortable in someone else’s space. I’m a bit of a loner and I like my own time and place. I am comfortable here, now. Grahamstown now is people and place just as comfortable as an old, worn jersey you’ve had for years and years.  People I can know through changes and growth and not lose. There is something Simon-and-Garfunkel-esque-ly special about that kind of old friend,

“Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park-bench quietly?

How terribly strange to be seventy

Old friend, memory brushes the same years, silently sharing the same fears”

Simon and Garfunkel, “Old Friends”