PROLOGUE

Isn’t it beautiful how love and destiny orchestrate their little song-and-dance?

Cindy had just completed her master’s degree and had returned to her native Germany from Copenhagen only to found out that all her peers had automatically adopted the mindset of being grown-ups and were systematically embarking on the sensible path of getting jobs, building up their careers and earning money.

Why Cindy on the other hand, had opted for a volunteering job at an NGO, which is something most people do when they are a little bit younger, perhaps fresh out of college. And even stranger, out of all the options available, she'd applied for opportunities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or Georgia, the one in Europe, in that order of preference. She would be gone for a whole year.

Her choice of opting for those places was not at all rational and she have no idea why put that region on her radar in the first place other than perhaps curiosity about little known post-soviet era countries.

She would be stepping away from the familiarity of Europe, as well as from her boyfriend, whom she'd been with for almost a year at that point. People around her weren’t being that supportive of her decision either and she truly couldn’t explain why shs was going ahead with it, other than to say that a strong feeling was telling her she just had to do it.

When it comes to big decisions in life, Cindy have always found that when she don’t listen to her mind and just follow her gut, things actually pan out quite nicely, she knew to trust that. 

That same strong feeling was also saying that she would end up being placed in Georgia and soon this was confirmed. she was to be stationed in Tbilisi, the capital.

She said what she thought was a temporary goodbye to her boyfriend in Germany and headed to Georgia for the year. 

The nature of the relationship with her boyfriend was such that we both had fairly busy lives and weren’t living in the same place so we would only catch up on weekends. 

Having such an active tempo was something that she thrived in, something that fueled and fulfilled her, yet she also sensed that she longed for a base, a nest, the kind of existence that would make her say, “I’m home.”

Her boyfriend was someone who checked all the boxes, someone that her parents would approve of but since she'd moved to Georgia and had time to experience things from afar, she has been growing increasingly aware of her unhappiness.

Being long-distance now, all we had was verbal communication and she realized her chats with her boyfriend were mostly small talk and fairly superficial. She hadn’t yet realized that this was actually a reflection of the lack of  emotional depth in their relationship and so she was always left with this feeling of deficiency that she just couldn’t pinpoint and transfer from her subconscious into her conscious reasoning.  

Suddenly without the cover of Cindy's  distraction packed, fast-paced life, the relationship was standing naked right in front of her and she was trying very hard not to look at it lest she had to acknowledge its flaws. Everything fit so well on paper, how could he not be the right one for her? It was a dance of avoidance between her and herself. One of them was bound to get tired.

The bland, arid landscape of that relationship was actually going to be quite important in terms of the contrast it set to all that was to follow when she met Gerard, but she had no idea of that at the time.