Feb 2026 - Berlin
What's next?
February started with the end of something. I met Vivian back in the Durham, with the Taiwan group, where she was studying a premaster in Sheffield. We all converged in Liverpool for a weekend - I was plagued with the problem of NOT BEING ABLE TO TAKE MY EXAMS, because I had stupidly delayed paying my tuition for. No. Reason. I had to ask Nathan to borrow thousands of pounds. Funnily enough, he had it just sitting in his bank account too. That weekend was fun.
But our first meetup was during a London stint - still Durham era - where she was late for dinner by almost 20 minutes. It was December in London and she had spent ages taking photos by regent street with the Christmas angels in the background. I don’t remember much of the dinner. All I thought was this girl was a bit rude for making everyone wait this long.
Our friendship bloomed in a waves of short trips across Europe. We did not check in with each other often, yet we had both decided that each year we would visit a city in Europe together. Davis came along at first - but in the end he had to return to Taiwan because he didn’t manage to get a visa sponsor. Our trips went from a trip to just a duo. And in February, 2026, Vivian would go back to Taiwan for the same reason.
I would never consider a Vivian a “best friend” - we clicked, on a level of a weird superficial intensity. We had trips where the conversations didn’t stir anything within me, maybe it was due to English being her second language and my Chinese degrading heavily over the years. But I think it was marred by something different - we just viewed the world a bit differently, valued things differently, and didn’t talk about things the same way. I wouldn’t fault any of us - people are just different sometimes - but it spelt the irony of this ironclad tradition of the annual euro trip with a slight denatured bond between us - where I couldn’t just be myself fully to have conversations otherwise had with Dom, or Amiya, or just other people.
I would be lying if I said didn’t have fun in any of our trips. And perhaps admitting that just worsens the irony further. Some of my experiences across Italy in the late 2023 summer: a paramount view of an active volcano, the hot dry breeze brushing across our linen shirts and dresses, as she poses in front of the Mediterranean Sea. She looked pretty - demanded many retries and different angles. Giving up, I would eventually retire my photo taking rights honors to Davis for the remainder of the journey.
We drank heavily in Cefalu. Davis would go to bed early that night as vivian and I discuss our lives, more in depth than usual. At the time, I was spellbound under this existential paradox of infinity. As insufferable as it sounds, I was haunted by this idea of a never ending chase of goals - the lingering question of, when one has completed their dream goal: now what? Now what. A next goal? Then what after that? It dawned on me heavily because I had just came out of a horrible 3 month unemployment stint. Tough job search; never ending rejections. And when I did eventually find that job, the europium of securing myself employment, that would pay me 4K each month, was somehow overshadowed by the existential paradox of the Sisyphean climb in life. I forgot the advice of what she offered that night, nor did I come up with any resolution on my own. Looking back, the very existence of that liminal moment - a snapshot frozen in time - where neither of us, nor anyone around us, would ever be able to repeat this experience of being in Cefalu again for the first time was the very answer I should be looking for.
We drank and talked endlessly that night. The restaurants started to close. The streets started to quiet down into a stir. Yet, while we were discussing the seemingly meaninglessness of life, the incessant suffering implied upon a need for never-ending goals, this moment was paradoxically finite, one and never to be again. Infinity and zero. I still look back to this moment in fondness from time to time. The hot summer in Sicily.
We decided to go to Berlin for our last trip in Europe, in the midst of a freezing February. Colder than usual. We decided on Berlin because we met this Korean girl earlier last year when we went hiking at Kongisee. She was working in Berlin at the time and said she would show us around - we took her up on that offer. It was one of the most miserable Sundays Ive experienced. Shops were closed; the winter winds are brutal; and the conversations were lifeless. Vivian became much more attached to her boy problems and after a while, it felt like our conversations were just going in circles. We ended our trip without the profound closure that we thought it would give - for a tradition that was held strong for years, it ended with a brief goodbye at the airport.
Vivian would fly back to Taiwan on Valentines day.