On Awkward Meetings

Waiting outside the class roo, our eyes met briefly
Then they shifts to our respective feet
We've been sitting in the same class on and off now for 8 weeks
He speaks first, referring to the room change for the class
"Hope we have the right room"
"Yeah, I think we do, there are some other guys"
I indicated other people from the class sitting behind the escalators.
"I'm about to do a talk on Marx..." He started vaguely.
"Yeah, it was a good reading."
"Yeah, I enjoyed it."
The noise of the people coming down the hall coloured the silence.
"You don't come to this class very often"
"No,"
(He had a very enthusiastic way of speaking: He was animated, good humour but he almost spat out his words)
"This have been a bit crazy this semester."
His voice then dropped and I missed the first few words of his next sentence.
"...died, then my girlfriend left to go overseas for four months, and then I lost my job, I might get to do the readings but I can't get to the classes."
I smiled because I didn't know what else to do.
"Yeah, I understand."

Kelly

She wrote my name at the top of the page of her diary, next to the day and the date. 

The conversation had begun in the way which I have been seeking to create them myself, but she was the creator. 

She asked me, somewhat bluntly, in the slow-syllable way she spoke, what my name was. 

Drawing a border around the word she'd written, she then asked what I was doing here. 

It was a strange way to phrase a banal question. Her straggly, mouse-coloured bun nodded with her as she listen to me explain my orientation within university. 

She started a bachelor with a major in ecological major - a stream which was such down within a year, due to lack of interest.

I am taking a cultural-studies major, something that has also been consigned to the flames of history. It's all 'specialisations' now; psychology, journalism, digital media, multimedia.

The 'Aims & Objectives' paragraph on the Bachelor of Arts website reads 

'The Bachelor of Arts degree is designed to produce graduates who are able to contribute effectively and professionally to a dynamic global economy'

She traces another line around my name in her diary as we share a silence.

John

I met John. This was the first time I have really gone out of my way to approach someone outside of class to get to know them. I saw him walking down the platform with the sun in his eyes. I had my shoes off, my headphones on; feet communing with the bitumen surface, Radiohead softly filling my head.

I'm more often than not, one to wait for people to come to me. Not out of any elitism (although, sometimes I tell myself it's so) but more out of fear; fear of rejection, of the unknown, I suppose.

John is in my philosophy seminar. We'd exchanged some ideas that afternoon across the classroom, and I wondered further about some of his assertions. 

He talked about economic approaches and how they could be reconciled within a more humanistic philosophical model; something with a real-world basis.

I slipped my shoes back on and turned off my music, walking over.

"Hi" I said.

The train came and we'd already covered where I lived, and that no, I wasn't Canadian (he picked up on the strange fact that I have a habit of elongating my 'ere' - as in 'here' and 'where' - sounds).  Within minutes we were getting existential, both trying to comprehend some of the concepts which had been presented to us that afternoon.

The conversation oscillated between commonalities and lofty rhetorical questions of reductionism, Hegel, dialectical patterns and the world of becoming.

He's from New Zealand, although the accent has been beaten out of him, by people always asking him to 'say things'. 

He 'sells alcohol to people'; a dry characterisation of a job within our society which made me smile. No dressing it up with 'I'm a barman.' Straight to the essence of the matter: implying  his uncomfortable status of the larger implications of his employment.

He lives in Airport West so we took the same train that snaked slowly through the city loop, out towards North Melbourne, were I was to get off. As I made to do so, our conversation closing with the knowledge that it would most likely continue at our next class; he shook my hand, and I smiled.

"Enjoy." I said.