Yet again, I find myself at another airport. A flight to take me away to somewhere else. I’ll fly in the sky, and then I’ll land and continue this life of mine. I sit here, 22 years old, about to start my final term at university. I can remember so clearly when I graduated high school, and the thought of graduating from university seemed impossibly far away. Four years? That was like an eternity. What would my life look like then? Where would I be? Who would I be? Well, it turns out I’m still the same little girl, but I’m also a woman who has been curated and carved out of the choices and turns I have made. Choice. What a beautiful thing. The most beautiful thing possibly? A choice. A simple word that now seems to hold the weight of the world.
I stayed in the ocean for almost five minutes yesterday. Each step was excruciatingly cold. I then sunk to my neck. Wanting to scream, so I screamed. And then I remembered to breathe. Deep. In. Out. In. Out. Through the nose, out the mouth. The water bit into my skin like tiny razor blades. I looked out. The deep, hunkered mountains laid out before me. They looked so peaceful. Like the soft curves of a sleeping woman covered in a warm green blanket. I closed my eyes then. Numbness had settled into my bones. I started doing small, slow dance movements with my arms and legs. It was so quiet. But I could feel life pulsating all around me. Or maybe it was just my blood. Life was loud, but my mind was quiet. The cold of the water acted like a fallen tree on a highway. I could finally listen to what was always so hard to hear.
When I was 18, I wrote a personal essay, “Feeling lost as an 18-year-old”. Reading it back made me giggle at myself. So dramatic Jeez! Maybe I’ll read this back in four years and laugh at myself too. In the essay, I explained that I felt like I was sitting at the bottom of this massive teacup and didn’t know how to get to the top. If I trick myself into thinking I haven’t changed since then, this metaphor clearly shows me I have. How sad that I felt like life was closed in by four walls, and the only way out was up. Now, I see life all around me. I see the
choices I make every day as the life that will be splayed out before me when I die. It will never be about getting to the top. I’m glad I learned that, if nothing else.
I put my ear against my mom’s chest on Christmas Eve. I heard her heartbeat. Thump. Thump. Thump. It was a sound and feeling I knew would stay with me. It sounded so constant, so steady, but it terrified me at how fragile I knew it was. The morning I left, she came into my room early and lay under my green polka-dot blankets with me. “Sometimes I wish you never grew up.” She said, stroking my hair behind my ears. “It all happened so fast. Like I blinked, and it was over.” I hugged her two times before I left, wanting to hold her forever. To stay in this moment for eternity. Knowing that we were holding each other to keep from falling apart.
When he dropped me off at the airport, I hugged my dad and told him I loved him. He looked back at me with a smile, with eyes the same colour as mine. I slowly made my way to security, looking back at him every few seconds. Tears threatened to spill, and my throat was aching, trying to suppress them. I’ve said bye many times to many people in my life. But why does it never get easier? For me, it just gets harder. What type of crazy person leaves a home so comfortable and full of people who you love and who love you? But I reminded myself that it is in these hellos and goodbyes, however painful, where I have found the most profound sense of love and what it means to be a human being. I think these moments are simultaneously beautiful and painful because the immensity of the love is intensified almost to a breaking point. Ends and beginnings demand us to feel so many things at once. My dad disappeared around the corner. I wondered to myself what he’d think about on the car ride home. I thought about him driving back in silence and resuming his life as if I’d never been there. A daughter who would now only ever be a visitor in his life, arriving home only to leave. Tears then started to escape. A girl who looked my age turned around in the line and handed me a tissue; her eyes were red too. “It’s
hard, isn’t it?” She said to me with a small smile. “Really fucking hard.” I laughed with a small sob. She laughed back.
One day later, I find myself back in my room on College Street. The final season of this chapter begins. I took an Uber from the airport and arrived late at my apartment. I looked out the window and greeted a city that now held so much of who I had become. Gratitude swept me away in an emotional cloud.
Both of my roommates were not home, and I found my first few minutes in the apartment surreal. I touched the walls as I walked around and watered my dying plants in a state of subtle mental numbness. Perhaps it was because I was tired, or maybe our minds need time to catch up to our bodies when we suddenly travel long distances. My room, with its oatmeal-coloured walls and blankets, pictures and nooks that I’ve collected in my young adult life, and plants scattered throughout, now greeted me just as the cedar trees and seagulls said bye to me less than 12 hours ago.
I tried to go to sleep after showering. But the sounds of drunk laughter and jazz music from next door kept me awake. I had become used to falling asleep to the deep hush of rain in a sleeping forest. The duality of my little life displayed before me suddenly. I felt like I could close my eyes and open them and be at home on the island or at home on College Street. Every blink would bring me to a new reality. My sense of where I was and who I was in the world blurred. I laid in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin and watched the patterns of the warm streetlights shimmer along the wall. My heart felt both full and heavy. I wanted to cry and laugh.
How lucky was I to have different places in the world where love was held. I felt like I was about to explode with this feeling. I imagined myself shattering into hundreds of little parts.
Each piece would fly like a feather and get carried in the wind to all the people and places I loved. I would float down, and they would catch me. I would materialize and stand beside them and laugh at how funny it all was. I wish I could be with all of them.
I finally began to feel the dream world beckoning me in. The saxophone caressed my hair, its notes resembling my mom’s fingerprints, and the drunk laughter softened and began to murmur a lullaby, a voice that sounded like my dad’s, calling me down for dinner. The patterns on my wall could also be from the glow of the moon, shining through my childhood window. My blankets pulled to my chin weren’t just oatmeal coloured; they were green and scattered with polka dots.
Oh, I thought to myself as I drifted off. How strange it all was. How absurd. How beautiful.