The first Quarter of your Century

I am twenty five today.

I write this tipsy from a meal of white wine and thai food with twenty of my favourite people in Tokyo. I am grateful and full of how beautiful it was to have them all there.

Yet somewhere I felt just a little bit empty - for all the other people that I wanted round that table - Robbie, Chris, Selmo, Mina, Sinead, Sarah, Rose, Ems, Jed, Charlie, Vicky, Andrew, Ben, Claudia, Lea - the list goes on and is full of everyone I've loved and said goodbye to and yet of course overwhelmingly still love.

I try not to write people's names in a blog - but just occassionly it is only by writing a name that I can conjure that sense of a person, solid in their absence. Sometimes I believe geographical distance does not matter. And then sometimes I see that it very much does - because a year and a half is a long time to be away - and invariably I don't see that there is anywhere very much to go back to.

Myths - conjured up to keep us searching.

- Just at this moment when I am content with Japan, when I look around a table and see twenty wonderful people looking back at me - when I enjoy my work, when I love my home here - just now, I decide that I must pack my bags and leave. Maybe I search out the eternal challenge of new and difficult. It is not enough to be content in a moment. Or maybe, it is just easier to be content in the moments of goodbye. I have less than three months left. So even as I long and miss absent friends I prepare to leave the ones I have here and start over - with another tearing goodbye, and another bright beginning. Transient lives that we live - where we cannot start our next adventure before closing the last.

So - here as twenty fifth birthdays give way again to real life I wonder where those absent figures at my birthday table are - and I hope they are all safe and beautiful and well.

From an oversentimental Becks on her first quarter of a century x