If I lay here...

...if I just lay here. Would you lie with me and just forget the world? I don't quite know, how to say, how I feel.

I always liked this song. Now, I love this song. It just symbolises two things that I know I will always remember.

1) Slow dancing to it at prom with Eliza. Whenever I hear it, I can be right back in that moment, dancing, singing and laughing with her and our other friends and not giving a damn about anything else in the world.

2) Singing it very loudly in the back of a minibus with 5 other girls in Croatia. It was during our final journey, our final half hour on expedition. We'd all been sleeping for most of the journey from Starigrad to Split Airport, but we all woke up around the same time when we were nearing Trogir (the closest, most lively town to Split) and the driver (a lovely woman who only looked about 21) turned the radio on. Throughout the week, whenever we'd been in the minibuses, we'd had an English-Croatian channel on. The signal/reception was horrific all week, we never managed to get through a full song without it breaking up and us missing parts. We pulled up to some traffic lights in Trogir and sat in traffic for a few minutes, it was quite bad because of a lorry up ahead, I recall. Chasing Cars came on the radio and all 6 of us instantly joined in singing along. Our driver turned the radio up because she could tell we all liked the song. And, without any pauses or moments of stopping, we all sung along for the entire song. I can never tell the story and do the moment the justice it deserves. There was just something that happened while we were all merrily singing along that sticks with me. We were absolutely exhausted and we just wanted to get on the plane and go home, but we all came alive for the first time that day. Some of our best moments were spent during bus journeys and I'm so thankful to have a memory that will always remind me of that.

Why have I just said all of that? You may well ask, I know I would be... I had a pretty bad morning this morning. It began with another awful Spanish lesson, was followed up by an hour spent uploading video footage for my CoPE video without the rest of the group I'm working with, and ended with me sitting in the common room with Fern and Keyana trying not to burst into tears. There are TVs in the common room that play random music (previously selected on the jukebox I think). Chasing Cars came on and, for a brief moment, I was dancing at prom then back sitting in a minibus in Trogir traffic.

I'm so glad that so many of my memories of Croatia (and school) link to very random every day occurances. Sometimes, in the midst of everything that's going on, something will just remind me of Croatia and I'm instantly reminded of how much I went through there and how much I've learnt. I'm not saying that this always happens right when I need it, but when it does, it's the biggest help I could receive. It's the small things, such as this morning. I had to carry three reasonably heavy bags across my village to the bus stop. My natural reaction to anything like this was always "I hate my life!", but this morning...I just found myself going "You carried three times this in Croatia up a mountain and back down again, what's the point in complaining?"

I used to always expect too much from life, from my friends and family etc. Over the summer, I've learnt to expect nothing, and appreciate the little details that everybody else misses. If you start complaining about the world, you miss the fun in it.

Besos ♥
Rachel

"I can smell burning...am I on fire?!" - Catherine Drayton during our final night as happy campers