Little Mediocre Things: What I Miss The Most During This Pandemic
If the next day the world is ending, have you ever asked yourself what things you will miss the most? I asked that question a lot to myself lately due to this stay-at-home.
When I asked myself this question at night, the answers were not as I thought it would be. I thought that I was going to miss grand moments in life as in winning something, achieving big goals, and going places but turn out, what I really going to miss is a compilation of moments that I classified as Little Mediocre Things.
1) Train trips
It’s the first thing on my mind. Six months ago, I had an internship in Tasikmalaya, West Java. But since my company’s head office is in Jakarta, I traveled back and forth a lot. And on weekends, if I get bored hanging around in Tasikmalaya, I spontaneously book a train trip to Jakarta, or Yogyakarta or Bandung, the nearest cities as in I limit it to the 8-hours maximum trip duration. I was a beginner on choosing trains back then, and there was this one time where I picked a wrong train with an awfully bad seating plan. The chair’s seat is so hard that my bottom feels so much pain for sitting for almost eight hours straight, and the fun part, I was seated next to a couple who was crazily in love (yes it’s three-seat kind of plan), and I (the most single woman ever), need to hear their love conversations and watch their PDA.
Overall, I love train trips. I love watching the window of the train, sometimes it felt like a painting of trees, houses, people, hills, and paddy field. It made me feel disconnected to this world as if I were there only to watch and watch it faded.
2) Buying coffees
This is the banalest answer I could ever come off with, I really wish I can come up with things that were categorized as deep and non-shallow. But really, I will really miss buying coffees. I used to have a sleepover with my friends every Friday/Saturday night. We used to do this bar-hopping thing (except the fact that we rarely get wasted or drink), we were just dancing, but we always come back home after 3 AM, get to sleep at around 4 or 5 AM, and woke up at around 1 PM at the latest. The first thing we would do will be ordering coffees, to be exact, too many coffees. We ordered two coffee usually for each one of us (using promo code, HA!) after we had lunch and took a shower, we would be going out to another coffee shop. I called it ‘ordering coffee so I can ‘sober’ enough to go to an actual coffee shop’. We were too caffeinated, too coffee-person. These days when you can go to a coffee shop with friends is the day you took it for granted.
3) Hanging Out with Friends
Classic. You had said. But at this point, I was looking back to those times where I and my friends spent times together even as simple as eating in random seafood or nasi goreng stalls, coffee shop hopping, strolling at night ended up going to the same place over and over again, just staring blankly at the ceiling, watching city lights, splitting bills, taking pictures of us in public transportation, eating Indomie with strangers, ended up in the same fast-food restaurant over and over again, picking up which promo code offer us the cheapest price, and just being there with each other even when we barely say anything because our minds haven’t woke up yet due to the lack of sleep.
All these things feel like a walk in the park. But, maybe, just a maybe, these little mediocre things were worth living for at all, maybe it’s what we thought not as important as it looks were the things that made life is bearable from one day to another day. Maybe, after all, the little mediocre things were not little as it seems, maybe it is grand, and maybe it is not mediocre as it seems, maybe personally, for each one of us, it’s beyond compare.
