Life sometimes feels like the fresh rain that has fallen through the sunshine. “Evaporated” by Ben Folds Five… “‘Cause it’s all smiles and business these days and I’m indifferent to the loss. I’ve faith that there’s a soul somewhere who’s leading me around. I wonder if she knows which way is down… Here I stand, sad and free. I can’t cry, I can’t see what I’ve done. No God, what have I done? Now I poured my heart out. Now I poured my heart out, it evaporated. See?”

Today will be a day spent indoors, studying. I think I owe that to myself since spending the last 4 days out of the house. Yesterday it rained for the first time since it had started being so sunny and warm. I had decided to go visit Marc. It had been a long time since I’d seen him or any of the other guys due to our increasingly hectic schedules. I really wanted to meet up with everyone to visit Marc on Saturday but by the time Yogi had called me, I was still in the car on my way home from teh wedding reception. I was actually napping and the phone woke me up. It was 7 pm and they were all ready to leave so he was asking where I was. I told him we were passing Northampton and still about an hour away from home. So, I decided there and then to visit Marc the following day.

On the way, I popped in to see L at work. Working in a big department store in central London means occasionally spotting the odd celebrity and yesterday I spotted someone who may have excited my brother: Simon Cowell (big record executive who has gained notoriety as a straight-talking judge on Popstars, Pop Idol and American Idol). I told my brother this and he was quite surprised, which brought on a barrage of questions covering everything from his height to the proximity of his trouser waist-band above the navel! If my brother was with me at the time I would have convinced him to do a quick impromptu singing audition right before Simon; perhaps a rendition of a popular Britney Spears song.

It was good seeing Marc again. He looked much better from the last time and much had changed. He had put on weight and it seems that his upper body strength had improved many fold. He had said as far as he was cocnerned, he was 100% again, except for in the urology department, which would be looked at in 2 weeks. We spoke of fate and destiny because the accident happened shortly after he had gotten back into the swing of working a proper job with proper hours. He took this as a sign and felt that someone up there didn’t want him working. Now, he says he won’t get back into working unless it’s something to do with gaming, which I think suited him well anyway.

He spends a lot of time playing on his new Game Boy Advance SP and watching TV. He showed me a channel he watched regularly called CNX, which looked like it was some sort of cult Asian channel. They were showing the old David Carradine Kung Fu series and anime series, and Marc was telling me about all the new Hong Kong films they were screening on it. They were showing HK and Korean movies that only came out last year, so that channel had pretty much everything I could want from an entertainment channel. I want it, I want it! He was looking so much happier and he said that for the first time in a long time he felt that everything was going right and that everything was finally falling into place. It was looking like he would be making a really good recovery so I told him to cling onto hope for his situation. He asked that I do the same too, for my own.

Time is relative. To bring up the same Einstein quote from a previous day, “When you ask a man to sit with a beautiful woman for an hour, it seems like a second. Ask the same man to sit on a hot stove for an hour and it seems like an eternity.” Sometimes, time flows like water tracing paths down a steep mountain. Sometimes it trickles by so slowly like thick syrup clinging to the sides of a decanted container and it’s at those latter times that I feel things could be better. If you can look back into the past and wonder how so much time has passed, you can be sure you’ve led a happy past. I took a moment to reflect and found this to be true. Time has marched by and I fumble to remember what I was doing a month ago or even half a year ago. A lot of good things have happened since last year and these are the things I will take away with me, along with the lessons learned through the bad times. But I try not to reflect too much on the past because people who live in the past never get to see how truly beautiful the sunshine of tomorrow is. I dwell on the future and the things yet to come, because my past is elsewhere now, in someone else’s hands. The past is no longer in my hands. The only thing in my hands now is my own future. Along with hope.