Don't cross that bridge till you come to it.

by Ana Laura Fasola (Canada)

Making a local connection Lithuania

Jumping on the train seconds before the doors closed, I wished I had missed it. That poster at gotten to me at the worst time possible. "No Story starts with "It was cold, so I stayed home"...". I thought I decided change the course of my life, the passing days at work, at school, at home. Yet that decision now seemed to me the most pointless I had ever taken. I knew no one and no place in that country; there had never been a reason for me to exist there. All that I had seen looking at the destination board was the name Vilnius, which I remembered seen in a mandatory language class back in school. For all I knew, all my teacher had said had been lies and I had just asked the cab driver a ride to the printer room instead of the Hotel. He seemed please with my answer, and commented he was on finally meeting a tourist that could speak the language. "Tourist don't care about our culture", he had said. He kept going about the weight of their ancestry it had carried, and all the laws that were meant to protect it while all I wanted was to concentrate on the paintings car oil was creating over the rainwater in the streets. After dropping me off, he had told me to call him the next day if I wanted to see the city as a local. He may have been the friendliest person I had met in months, or he simply had enjoyed the large tip I had left. I had ended up calling him the next day. It had been his daughter who had shown up. This bouncy, willing, full of hope twenty years old, who had never set foot outside of her city since her birth. Maybe it was better this way; she must have explored every single corner of this city not to get bored when staying in the same place for twenty years. That day she had asked more questions that she had answered. While they say learning new languages opens your mind, I simply think it helps you understand their struggles, the depth of the words that usually get lost in translation. While I know I couldn't have found that hole-in-the-wall bar by myself, what made the fact of being accompanied so special was having someone to share those moments you could never explain with words to those who were not there; in that precise moment, the smell lingering on my hands making me crave for a second drink. Had I been a sentimental person I would have told you how that day, we had built bridges that, not unlike the one we crossed that afternoon, reunite people. But as a realist I will simply show you my next train ticket.