FIRST MEETING

On 16th October I try to get early to college so as to be ready for our meeting. I am waiting for Kelvin and Vivien by the student entrance, and here they are, exactly as described by Kelvin, a fab, groovy, windswept and interesting old farts holding hands and looking lost, I go and say hello, I feel as if I had meet them before. As planned we go up to the cafe and we have a nice an informal chat which is suddenly interrupted by a fire alarm. As the educated people we are, we evacuate the building and through the closest exit we get to the fire meeting point outside the building, it has to be said it's a beautiful one, just by one of the entrances of the Royal Albert Hall. Kelvin and Viv joke about their day out, the fire alarm seems to have been just a fake and we go back inside the building.

The last few weeks I've been having some problems at work, a new manager and his friends have been bullying me, at the beginning I couldn't understand what was going on, in the end it was just they wanted to get rid of me so that his friend could get my place. Kelvin tells me about his two failed Hepatitis C treatments and his two liver transplants, during a whole week he thought he would die. My problems at work seem to dissipate. He feels so positive about everything and so secure about the third treatment, the one he is undergoing now, he is 100% sure he will get recovered this time and I trust him. He talks about his long trips to India, where together with Viv, he has spent so many winters and reminds me of a trip I did to Nepal a few years ago, where I decided to go back to university and study art.

I went to Nepal with my boyfriend with the intention to accompany someone who was about to adopt a child. The child was meant to be an orphan, but just a few weeks before the adoption should have taken place, the child parents appeared and pick her up from the shelter she was living at. We had bought the tickets already so we decided to travel anyway, no route or any plan. We ended up taking a bus through Siddharthara road in what was still quite a rainy monsoon. The road was full of landslides, a few times we had to get off the bus, literally climb up the massive rocks that were blocking the road or cross a river where a bridge had just collapsed. The journey was full of curves and at a point the floor got so slippery you could feel the bus driver wasn't fully in control of the car, the bus was of course overloaded, in a sharp bend, one of the wheels lost contact with the roadbed, to the left there was a small Hindu temple dug into the rock. Everybody moved their hands as praying, I looked at the precipice through the window and I really though I was about to die, my remains not to be found in the depths of a remote Nepalese river. It was exactly in that fragile fragment of my life when I thought the game was literally over, when I found in my mind exactly the same thought that Kelvin was talking about, I didn't want to go to the grave with any regrets, and as I survived, I left my past behind to start a new life through art.