look where we were and look where we are

it's these two years in london that have me thinking about life more than ever. but no one else seems to think about it with me.
i said to Rob today 'look, we met in this alley last year and now we're walking down it to the flat we live in together'. look where we were and look where we are. i think these are such transient years. we're all here, gathered in this experience of a staff team for two years. look, we've come from all over the world and we're in this together. i say to John when we're cleaning 'look at us now John, one day soon this will all be memories' and he says 'yes' but i don't know if he means it. but all these moments and feelings and significances are just temporary, they're just building blocks. and i said to Sioned and Jayne and Anna 'how strange is it that all the way through your life and at every moment you've been conscious and alive and you've felt every interaction and every event as if they are all that matter, but when you look back on being aged 5 or 8 or 12 or 17 you can only remember pieces of it. all these minutes get simplified into a small list of memories' - and do we see now how all of this that we're doing is just going to get bunched up and collected in our minds as a time we used to be in? look where we were and look where we are and think where we will be. life is so heavy and so real. and then in staff meeting Kenji and i look at photos of Jane from when she was younger and her family photos and her newspaper clippings as a nurse. and you can't fake that stuff. you can't decide what you are going to grow up to be. and i asked whether her flat was Emmanuel property, but the thing is, from here on it's Jane's. she's not going anywhere from here, there's no next step in a career, she's in these people's lives and she's working hard for the kingdom here. and we come and go, pass through in our two year blocks, overlap by one either side and then spend the rest of our lives not being near each other. and here in my room, with all my photos on the walls, and my blackboard square and my 'not to be forgotten' stencil and the conversation turns to my visa's expiration and me trying to stick around for a couple of weeks to say goodbyes. and how come september i'll need to be out, i'll need to give my room up, paint it new and paint it clean and paint myself out of the memory of the house. and another two years will roll on by with new faces on a photo board and sunday lunches with 'get to know you' questions, and i'll be on a plane, flying away from a gap already closed-in, taking a hundred thousand memories with me. and i'll leave my chords of significance tied to a thousand different places, with holographic ghosts memories playing over and over in the same streets. and here hurrah we're off again. life is dealing us all her pains and thrills. and in all of it, in the years from now someone will say 'i once knew...' or they'll say 'i've been there before' and our encyclopedic memory bank files away a place-name in a list. all the burns and bravery we suffered make us more of who we were going to be. but i am inclined to stop the song before it's played out and consider which piece of the whole i am inside of now. and how does my today change my tomorrow. form it, force it. i'm carrying all of this in my feelings and when it seems most significant, i can't help but ask 'do you remember where we were? because look where we are now'.