I met a rather curious person, not very likable. A shut in who sees no one and never leaves home, but very insistent about how cosmopolitan they are, and how well travelled and widely experienced and knew what was what about the world. All that travelling was while study abroad during their A’levels, over two decades ago. It was rather sad, but they were not a pleasant type, so.
A woman told me about her childhood, in one of the wealthiest households in the country, but a bitter and unhappy home such that her teacher insisted on visiting to find out why she never seemed to want to go home. This woman is now quite old and a little forgetful, but can quote the poems (Tennyson, Brooke etc – this was in colonial times) that she lost herself in.
A man told me about a desperate trip to the border with Afghanistan, driving there, staying at a local official’s house overnight and the next morning going on several hours to a village in the mountains where there was reputed to be a healer who could cure a family member. It was a time when the Taliban were very active there, so the official deputed an armed escort and interpreters. He insisted on completing the trip overnight because he couldn’t bear to leave his family member for longer. It was a strange quest, from the city to the mountains, and a private offering of love, and one that no one else understood or valued. It failed, the person died.
I met an old woman I used to visit often with my mother and she gave me a tight, long hug and then explained several times to everyone there that I had hugged her long and hard because I was missing my mother, that seeing the old woman had reminded me of her because there was no reason I would hug her for herself.
An woman in her sixties revealed that she has adopted a son, one in his thirties, to the bemusement of all. A son or a young lover – no one dare ask.