All good things come to an end (but there is nothing new under the sun)

I've talked about this before, but back then I just started thinkging that here nothing and nobody is consant, and once, not so far from now, I will be standing in the empty flat, because the boy have moved out, and I will be the most senior in the office because everybody else has left, and it doesn't matter that I know it's normal, and that in an environment like this people come and go even faster than usual, I will hate it all the same.

And it's particularly strange considering that I don't plan for (warning! Big words ahead!) ever or for long term or until retirement etc either. So I am here on a temporary basis, but how dare the others not want to be part of my life forever from now on, even after my life is not going on here any longer?

If somebody suspects hearing some stagiaire-life echos, they are not mistaken. And not only because the timetable of the stagiaire times „Monday language classes, Tuesday skate night, Wednesday Apoteca, Thursday swim day, Friday preparations for Saturday's party and Sunday recovery, debrief and press release” only differs a bit from the timetable we have here: Tuesday is movie night, Wednesday is Chalet, Thursday quiz, Friday Coco Jamboo and Saturday Tango Bar (Sunday is for recovery, debrief and press release), but also because everything is so fast and intense. Somebody showed up at our housewarming in November and we thought he was kinda weird (he was on time! and kept systematically opening bottles of sparkling wine), and then we spent a whole weekend with him in Kigali in February (Miss Rwanda was there too), and his farewell party lasted a week because we hated the fact that he was leaving us. At the Christmas party I thought that girl wasn't very original with her (my) red dress idea, and I don't like competition anyway, and now we are planning a seaside getaway for the Easter weekend. The girl I met on New Year's Eve and thought had an interesting face is now my Sunday coffee-in-sweatpants buddy. And of course the Doctor didn't even need all 75 days of this year to figure out my role in the group, or my frustrations and my tricks trying to hide them, but it's his job after all.

My role in this group, by the way, not very surprisingly, is to always have bandaids, sunscreen, napkins with me, to always know the timetable, to make sure everybody has their passports and nobody is hungry, ever. It may or may not be a coincidence, but our household has become the foster home of all the lost kids, where you can show up on a Saturday if you don't remember where you left your car on Friday, where you get fed soup and/or pálinka if the salmon-strawberry cake combination was a little too much for you, where all your love stories can be told, and where nobody is hungry, ever. I am very happy about this, because it just ended up being this way, and because we share all the feeding, pálinka-pouring, love story-listening and other tasks that come with foster-parenting.

All this of course doesn't make the whole situation any less schizophrenic: we all (or almost all) believe to be here on a temporary basis, but at the same time we all (or almost all) are currently calling this place home. Because there is no other way to do it. We all (or almost all) have a concept of home, and most of us can even show it on the map, but that's where our nephews and nieces live. And maybe one day, not so far from now, we will live there too. And then somebody else will be standing in the empty flat, hating it.