Dear Friends

Well. Here we are now. I can relax, start to evaluate, reflect on my life that whizzed by in the last 6 months. There was something kind of awful about the spring and summer. I guess I learnt how hard I can push myself, but it was to the detriment of my friends. Every week was a blur of work, eat, sleep- and my only social interactions happened with my coworkers and sometimes those I lived with. Don't get me wrong- I grew to love the people I worked with so much more, and to appreciate the inestimable value of next-door friends (you know, the kind who you can yell at across the yard and they'll amble over for a back yard fire, or if you've got a rare evening free you can knock on their door with a bottle of wine and drink and talk until the wee hours), but my other friends, my old friends, who lived farther away, or who were busy themselves, or unwilling to drop by spontaneously, those friendships suffered.

It's not that I grew to love them less. Not in the slightest. It wasn't that I wanted the friendships to end, or was subconsciously pushing them away- no. If anything, I knew exactly why my unavailability was causing them frustration. I knew that by disappearing I was asking too much of some. By being a terrible friend, I knew that I could ask nothing in return.

Yet. And yet, I continued this existence willingly. I tried- I really did. It may not have looked like much, but every phone call I made not work-related was a struggle for me. Every coffee date squeezed in between shifts meant a loss of an hour or two of precious stillness. I was at the point of exhaustion in my life where even to make a meal for myself was too much. I had nothing left to give, having given so much already to other areas. I was a shell. A broken body. A weary soul.

 You may ask, why? Why did I throw away so much, work so hard? What on earth could be worth it? And this is where I can now clearly see my hierarchy of values appear. What is the most important thing on this planet to me? My family. More than travel, more than friends, more than boyfriends. If I want to be close to my family, I need to move. And I am in the unfortunate/fortunate position of supporting myself. I have too much pride to ask my parents for help. Which means working. For money. Filthy lucre. More than just enough to support my life. I needed money for plane tickets, for visas, for rent, for food, for trains.

And so I ask- can you blame me? Can you really throw guilt on my shoulders that the reason I disappeared this summer was to make money to be able to be with my family? That I called less than usual, that I never had time to hang out, that I wasn't there for big events, for weddings, birthdays, hospital appointments- I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
But if I had to do it again, I would. And I'm sorry that that's the way it is. I wish it wasn't so.

Maybe I am a terrible friend, and this summer was just the breaking point. I have many, many faults, I know. I know that in a few months I will actually be leaving my family, to move to Australia (but that's just the hierarchy establishing itself again- once I have my family, the next most important thing to me is travel. And so off I go). And I would just like to say this. There are as many different kinds of friendship as there are people. It's natural for evolution to occur. People leave, and people come back, but that doesn't mean they care any less. I pick my friends carefully, and love them deeply. If you called and asked for help, I would be there in a flash. If you texted and said to come over, it's important- I would. I would get my shift covered if you wanted me to hold your hand at the doctor. No matter how much time has gone by.

So please, forgive me my shortcomings. Forgive the fact that I needed to pursue my dream of leaving a frozen city for somewhere warm. Forgive me for not having the free time to just chill on a sunny afternoon. Forgive me for not having the money handed to me year after year that would have enabled me to slow down. Forgive me for still caring and counting you all as friends, even when you felt otherwise. Forgive me for not wanting to give up or give in, even when things have changed. Forgive me.

So It's Begun...

And so it has begun, the goodbyes. I hadn't even realized that some would happen so soon. I guess it is August now, and with my decision to not come back to Edmonton after the road trip, the end of the month is creeping up.
It blindsided me. We went to a movie and then got Denny's dessert at midnight, and when we parted he said, Well, I guess this is goodbye for a few years.
I hadn't even been thinking that. But he was going to Germany later that week, and wouldn't be back before I left. Oh, I guess you're right, I said. We hugged, and I said It was nice to have met you.
And he laughed, and told me You're going to have to get used to this.
And I thought to myself, Oh dear, oh no. If this is hard, imagine saying goodbye to your closest friends. I am predicting August to be a weepy month.

Have fun in Germany, I said.
You'll have so much fun, he told me. You are just like a movie character. Like a character from a book. You will have lots of adventures.
He got out of the car.
I'll send you a postcard! I shouted after him.
And he smiled, and said Goodbye, Andrea.
Then shut the door.

I drove home, jittery from sugary pie and being up too late and a maelstrom of emotions. I didn't cry (enough tears have been shed over more important things), but I felt numb. I know that when I actually leave I will feel sad, but I will also feel overwhelming relief of having escaped, and excitement for the future. I also have come to understand over the years that there is very few growing experiences that aren't painful, and through the biggest and hardest and most difficult situations you come out the other side that much more refined.

23

"I was 21 years when I wrote this song.
  23 now, but I won't be for long.

  Time hurries on,
  And the leaves that are green turn to brown."
(Leaves That Are Green, Simon & Garfunkel)

I used to get anxious when I thought about the future. I remember sitting on a swing set with my cousin Jacq at the end of a long, hot summer day, and talking about our fears of entering grade 7- the year before we entered high school. I think I was nervous to have a locker, and to find my classes, and to be in a school with children as old as 18- who I guess aren't really children anymore, when you reach the legal age of voting.
But then it just naturally happened. One day I was going to the new school, and I was with my friends and a bunch of kids I didn't know, and everything went smoothly. The transition was easy.
The same thing happened with university. One year I had no idea what to expect. I didn't have a clue what a "major" or a "minor" was, or why I had to "declare" one, or why the Engineers had such a nice new building and I was stuck in a 1970's nightmare with asbestos in the walls. Then, about half way through my third week, everything fell into place. This was fun. I could talk to strangers, make new friends, learn such fascinating subjects.

Right now I feel the same way about the future. I have no idea how I am supposed to deal with my taxes, or find a fulfilling career, or even push out babies one day. But if I have gained any wisdom whatsoever from my past, it should be enough to know that when the time comes about for these things, I will find the strength and the courage and the humour to navigate them with grace and humility.

I'm turning 24 soon. People now make fun of us in our early 20's. You know nothing, they scoff. You are still barely formed human beings. You have no idea who you are and what you want. And I do, and don't, agree with them. Yes, maybe I am still learning new things about myself every other week, and yes, maybe I make mistakes more than you do. I still have a long way to go to figure out everything about myself and the world. But, I know what I want.

I want to be near to my biological family, and my chosen family. Maybe this doesn't mean geographical location, but that's not all that nearness entails. Family and my closest friends are the most important things in my life. When I am on my deathbed, the classes I took and the jobs I held and the money I hoarded will mean nothing. It boils down to love, plain and simple. Giving it, and receiving it.

I want to give joy to those around me. More superficially, I want a home full of flowers and laughter. I want to see more of the world, and discover how everyone is the same, and yet unique. I want to crusade for peace. I want to not stand idly by when wrongs are being done. I want to find the strength to do the right thing even when it hurts me.

I want to stay up all night sometimes, eating cake and drinking beer with my friends. I want to see more sunrises. I want to slurp noodles from a bowl of pho and laugh at the noise. I want to be held tight at night, and I want to be happy with being alone at night too.

I want to stretch my body to its limits. I want to feel whole in my skin. I want to feel every molecule of my being tingle when I jump off the dock after laying in the hot sun into the navy depths of the lake. I want to sail around some PNG islands and become tanned from the sun, and strong from hard work, and bleached from the salt water.

"I've discovered that there are only ever two reasons why anybody does anything: there is fear, and there is love." (Sister Julienne, Call the Midwife)  I want to do things out of love, not fear. I want to have children, and I want to not be frightened by the amount of love I feel towards them.

Holly Jolly

Airport again. It's a tradition now, I think you could call it. Already fraught with danger- an hour delay on the highway out to the airport resulted in me yelling and shouting obscenities while D, my driver, calmly told me to Shut the eff up because shouting at people would not make the traffic go faster. Nevertheless, it did result in her pulling onto the shoulder and pulling some sweet, illegal, chotskie-bro moves in order to move ahead. You go, Glen Coco.
London soon. I'm excited to see my dog.
I nearly broke this weekend. My shoulders are carrying so much tension that just touching them hurts. I wonder why I had forgotten about how much finals suck. It's not like it's new knowledge. It shouldn't be a surprise. But maybe because they were my last ones, it was hard to see the finish line. I kept on trying to pull the ol' sprinter trick and look beyond the finish line in order to push as fast as you can until the end, but my farther goal line was so blurry and anxiety-filled that I don't think it helped at all. It just made everything worse.
I don't know what is to become of me! She cried.
Oh, woe is me.
But then I just laugh because seriously, there will be time enough to worry. And this is the Christmas season- jolly and holly and merry and bright and all that. And I'm going to be in England with my fam jam. And I'm done school. And I have the best friends in the world.
OH DARN I'M HUNGRY. THEY BETTER FEED ME ON THIS FLIGHT.

Syringes From Syria

This is continued travel adventures from Cyprus. We ran wild on the beach and dunes, dug holes to hide from the wind, found caves and made them liveable. Why on earth we didn't think about food and water is beyond me. Maybe we were going to fish. Steal rain water. Be feral. But there were these broken needles all along the tide line, apparently washed up from Syria, and when we ran (we hardly walked) we kept our heads down to avoid stepping on them.
We had 2 thin fleece blankets between the 3 of us, and no other way of keeping warm. Fire, perhaps, but it rained so everything was wet.

Chris went swimming on the rocks and tide pools, and one day we hitched a ride out to some fascinating cliffs and a lighthouse. We climbed all over the cliffs and got sprayed by the smashing waves, and got lost, and got separated, and I remember that the utter freedom we had was terrifying. It felt very Lord of the Flies. After a week we left. We left in the early morning, walking along these country roads with our backpacks, through fields, in the sun, and across stone bridges. We walked for a long time, and took a break under a big tree, and I want to say we recited poetry but I think we were mostly silent. Finally a white van approached behind us, and we stuck out our thumbs and he stopped for us. Chris and Dani loaded into the empty, dusty back of the van, and I sat in the front with the driver who spoke not a word of English but we managed to communicate that we wanted taking to the nearest town. So for an hour or so we drove through the afternoon, and the windows were down and I stuck my hand out the window and hoped that Dani and Chris could breathe and weren't too scared in the dark.

He dropped us off in front of the big stone building where we had sat and watched a movie be filmed some days before. We sat again on the pillared veranda, and drank tea, and smoked cigarettes, and I think we ate some beans or something, or maybe a bag of strange chips because we were always hungry and had no food.

After a few hours break, waiting to see if a bus would come, we set off again. We walked to the edge of town, and then found a highway that seemed to lead back in the general direction we wanted to go (South), and again we walked and walked for hours. Finally a tiny car stopped for us, with two teenage girls in the front and a sullen, shy teenage boy in the back. Somehow we managed to cram all three of us plus our bags into the already tight car, and again, no English was spoken but we didn't care where we ended up, as long as it was somewhere. The girls were always laughing, and teasing the boy, and I remember being jealous of their clean hair and painted nails, because I'm pretty sure we looked and smelled like garbage. But they took us all the way back to Famagusta, and that night I think was the night Chris and I walked all the way to the deserted beach resort and then hitched a ride back with a crazy vegetable seller, who took us on a tour of the university campus and hospital and such, when really I just wanted to get back to the hotel where we were staying the night with Dani.

When you hitch a ride you are at the other person's mercy. And you owe them your attention, and you owe them your stories, and you owe them your smile and laugh and you owe them the allowance to be in the spotlight. A ride is never free. A meal is never free. Anything that appears to be free I guarantee is not.

Rough Travelling in Cyprus

 the three of us, after hitching a ride with some university professors to the tip of Cyprus

 the lawn chair that we used as a wind breaker in our cave on the beach

 the really quite cool old people on the tour we first hitched a ride from

the last little town before there were no more towns or villages

This is me, who after hibernating for weeks and letting my brain turn into mush from too much school and not enough dreaming, this is me remembering the second time I ever hitchhiked and how absolutely terrified I was to stick my thumb out, to open myself to the world and the road and every single car going past. I don't like to draw attention to myself like that. I feel it is invoking attention that is not positive, or negative, it is just a split second discernment by the drivers going by of who you are, where you are from, where you are going, and why.
The three of us caught a bus as far North as we could, and then started walking on the  main road out of town. I knew that we wanted to head North, North East-ish, and there was a sign eventually that pointed to a monastery and so we followed that road. We walked through a quiet neighbourhood, all little run down huts with yards with chickens and pigs and goats in them, and then we came upon a little grocery store so we bought a loaf of bread, some chocolate spread, a pack of biscuits, and three bananas. And then we kept on walking.
C had done the most hiking before, and he calculated that if we didn't find a ride it would take us around 10 hours to walk with our packs. It was a mild day, almost too warm, and it felt like limbo to not know exactly where we were or where we were going. We had a vague destination (Golden Beach) but other than that we had no guide books or maps or even sleeping bags. Looking back, it was quite foolish of us to just march off along this highway into a National Park with no supplies.
Luckily, we had walked for about 20 minutes before a large bus drove past us, and D stuck out her thumb. To our surprise, it actually stopped for us, and we ran to catch up to it, and hopped on to find it was a tour bus from a fancy hotel full of old English and German tourists going to see the Park and the monastery (the same one we had seen the sign for) for the day. The tour guide welcomed us, asked where we were headed, and said that they could drop us off at Golden Beach on their way back from the monastery. So we stowed our packs, and sat at the very back with an elderly couple from Cambridge. They were cool, obviously, since they had chosen to sit at the very back.

We chatted with them, and they asked us where we were from and why we were in the deepest backwaters of Cyprus, and I think they felt a little parently towards us. Which was OK, because it was sort of nice to have someone know where we were and to worry about us. None of our real parents had any idea, nor had they heard from us in a week.

After we saw the monastery, we said goodbye to the old tourists and the tour guide gave us a little map and his phone number in case we ran into trouble before dropping us off at Golden Beach. It was late afternoon by then, and we had had a long day and were looking for a sort of "free shelter". We found a bunch of bungalows and a reception hut that all looked deserted, and we tried the locks on the doors and found them all open but unfurnished. Then someone had the brilliant idea of trying the windows on the reception building, through which we could see had a couple of couch type structures, and voila! The windows were open. So we had shelter for the night. We sat at the picnic tables there on the beach and ate our bread, chocolate, bananas, and most of the biscuits. We were very hungry. Then we wandered the sand and explored the dunes until sunset, and then came back to the shelter area. We sat at the picnic table again and played cards and talked with our flashlights, and I had the brilliant idea of starting a story telling thing, that could be continued for weeks if we chose to write them down and then share them. Around 9 o'clock p.m. we crept through the open window of the reception building, put on all our layers of clothing, and wrapped ourselves in our towels. We were very afraid that someone would come out of the darkness and demand what we were doing, and kick us out into the night. There were a couple of strange lights we saw, and we sent C to investigate while D and I clutched each other tightly and tried not to scream. It was very cold that night, and none of us slept well.

Luckily the sun encouraged us to get up soon enough, and we packed our bags and dragged them down to the beach and hid them in some bushes right before the owners of the place came driving up the road, but they caught C leaving the reception hut. He told them some story about how we was just wondering how much it cost a night to sleep there, and they didn't question him further. He met us back on the beach, and we decided to try sleeping in the cave we had found the day before while exploring the dunes. It was a little sandy cave on the side of the dune, hidden by some bushes, with a shallow rock formation as the roof, but there wasn't much shelter from the wind, and we were afraid of the cold. So I tried dragging a broken lawn chair we found back to the cave as a sort of wind breaker, but we could tell that without a fire we would still freeze.  It was warm during the days, but since it was still only early April, at night the temperature dropped and the strong wind was cool.

Je ne sais quoi

(me, my sis, bro, and Father, waiting for a train in Calais, France, 1998. My mother always tried to dress us well, especially when we were living in Europe. As an adult it is more difficult to blend in with the locals then when you were a child!)





(me, D, somewhere near Flanders, 1998)



(me, Nic, Jacq, near Notre Dame in Paris, 2008. On our way to get breakfast croissants from a bakery in the Left Bank.)




(in the Louvre, after wandering Paris by myself. I would spend hours in the statue garden or find some niche and just sit and write.)

I knew it. I just KNEW it. For years I've been trying to emulate that certain "Frenchness", that I-don't-know-what it is style of dressing. Where you look incredibly put together yet undone, careless and carefree, but it's impossible to look bad because every single item of clothing you own is beautiful, tailored, unique, no matter what the combination is.
My favourite French blogger, Garance Dore, tried to explain it once.

Maybe it's stripes.
I own 10+ striped shirts of various styles. It's gotten ridiculous.

Maybe it's scarves.
I wear a scarf, or two in the winter, almost every day. In the Arctic it's not so much a fashion statement as a necessity for survival.

Maybe it's layers.
Yep, I layer. Again, with the whole trying to stay warm to not freeze off your limbs thing.

But now I know what it is, at least, I think so. IT IS A MINDSET. It is a sexiness that comes from not caring too much what you wear because you know you look beautiful no matter what. It is a "I have a life, and places to go, and people to love, so I don't have hours to spend on dressing in the morning". No wonder every piece a Frenchwoman owns is perfect: they would have to be when you just throw on clothes and run. It's a desire to look stylish, but not an all consuming desire: the most important things in life are not clothes and fashion, but rather your family, your friends, books, world news, having fun, working hard, eating well, admiring art, and hot yoga. And of course you need to look amazing while doing so, because a Frenchwoman knows that appearance is important.

Such a balance. To care enough not to care.