it's been some time

So I'm sitting in a slowly filling up airport. I arrived here about an hour and a half ago, in which there were two sleeping gentlemen on the otherwise empty airport chair-benches. 

I'm flying to Brussels, then taking a bus Brussels to Amsterdam for the weekend. 

I think I know the date(s) when I'm coming back to Canada for realz in June. 

I'm thinking a bit about dates now. Sort of, in a slow kind of remembering, tuned in. Mostly. 

How a week ago, I was going to Graz, Austria tomorrow. 

How two weeks ago, I was going to Rijeka, Croatia in two days.

How three weeks ago, I was in Belgrade.

How all of this has happened, how people have happened in the most stunning of ways. 

How this is no laundry list of events, not some kind of do it get it done say you did it sort of thing, but places that have showed me things, have expanded how I think of myself, this world, the people I know and the lives I don't, how every second and step inside every new border breaks down blank spaces on maps I never knew how to use, perhaps still don't, but my world has become colour now. Colour and sound, the way playlists will remind me of car rides and roll over sleepy mornings and the frost on the grass and road ahead.

I'm not feeling a creative kick drive at the moment to let you in on these last weeks, the trips and days and laughs and wonder and thing that have been my life of late. Though I promise to try and do so soon. 

Just wanted to put a bookmark in place of where I've been, perhaps as a reminder for stories, a reminder of dates. 

Here are some pictures. 

locks and rust and bridges and fortresses in Novi Sad, Serbia. 

0.62 cent beer in Belgrade. Less, if you convert the dinar to the euro. Haaaa

Rainy beautiful days in Ljubljana. 

Winter branches by my apartment, and cold evenings of clear skies and head craned backwards to see the stars, chatting with loves a world away and discovering the present tense, how it can be

Sunsets in Rijeka, Croatia, where we sat by castles on a balcony and squinted our eyes and drank cold coffee and laughed and spilled tea and were there, we were just there.

Baking bannock! Late at night a day after recovering my voice a day after losing it entirely in laughter and chatting around the city of Graz, all Christmas markets and German words and one foot in front of the other. It turned out pretty okay tasty for our international dinner the next day, where I couldn't speak from laughing so hard, how spectacular everyone was, games and desserts and words and company.

Ljubljana turned its holiday lights on.

I worked my way into the middle of the massive crowd full of children on shoulders and couples holding each other and old ladies tottering in; I wanted to feel the people around me, to know no one, hear the countdown in a language I'll not understand and that gasp, the collective "oooh", the mittened hands clapping and little kids laughing, that moment when wonder is not so far from all of us. 

-k