California Fiction

Abstract

In a busy cafe, a young university student eats lunch whilst reflecting on the lives of his American peers on a study abroad exchange programme. He finds it hard to comprehend the dissonance between their days of unrelenting, repetitive work and his own, unfulfilling life. Such comparison only amplifies his quiet grief at the last year of his life. Sitting alone amongst a room full of bustle, his internal narrative lays bare confusing feelings of loss, hesitation and inertia from the first year of study at university. A central focal point around which his emotions stir is a photo of his ex-girlfriend, in which he does not recognise the last pillar of his old self before he went to university. Yet this painful acceptance of their loss of ties becomes a vehicle for the first steps of his own repair.