twenty-three miles

wednesday october 1st. 

[ A year ago, this was my first day of classes at the University of Ljubljana (everything happened and now) ]

My soundtrack is  Still Corners- The Trip. 


This is what I do know: 

this weekend I hiked the Grand Canyon with my dad. 

factually it looked like 23 miles and 13 hours and 10 000 feet of elevation change. 

I was so far from everything, so disconnected. On a plane again in that grey space of non existing, it had been so long, to leave the country, to get away, to put every Thing, every ounce of paperwork and books and readings and assignments and papers and people and auditions and scripts and meetings and touch points and coffee dates and late nights and politics and conversations and burning, even the burning, to put it all here, while I went There. It wasn't a pause but an escape, it was a complete escape, and I turned off my phone and I got off of Facebook and I set out again and it was me and my head, me and my heart, me and my last-minute purchase of hiking sandals and a 5:42am bus and an airport, an airport again, and the routine of that, and how much I know it now, (check for passport, print boarding pass security checks purchase water bottle listen to music fall asleep go go just go). It was that, again, and a plane ride between two ladies from the Dominican Republic who said "you tell everyone who says you don't have nice handwriting that two ladies from the Caribbean think it is very nice", because I was writing and they watched me write and I heard them ask each other quieres tomar algo? si si, un cafe, and no one has ever told me my handwriting is nice before...probably because it isn't...and we laughed for a bit and the plane landed and I was There. 

Phoenix was hot, and we drove away, north, and it looked like this 

the most incredible sky, the most incredible sunset, the clouds, the open road 

(how it felt to be on the road again, under a sky that touches each horizon) 

the clouds roared and rumbled and flashed and sparked, and the wind picked up, and it was 9:19pm when we turned off the lights in our hotel room with the wake up call set for 3 am. 

3 am was dark, and the wind howled, and the sky flickered in the distance and the silence thundered and we parked the car and turned on our headlamps and gripped our hiking poles and then we left, 

                  we disappeared into the red rock heart of this planet and it was me and my feet and my dad and our bobbing flashlights in the pre-dawn darkness, slipping and tripping on the smooth sand between steep downwards steps that speak of an uphill to come, far off and in the distance, lights bobbing by us as the runners ran, the sky lightening, and then the most, the most, the most incredible sunrise and it dawned and broke and turned off our flashlights for us and the world was new, and the world was silent, and the world existed in the craggy rising red walls around us, a rhythm of walking, a gold that burned pink that burned bright orange and a white-haired woman said good morning, and i said, what a sunrise, and she said, incredible, incredible, the people who stay on the rim miss the best part, and we left. how much of that is life: on the rim, you miss the best part, walk forward, move on, keep going,
and we walked, and the dawn arrived and burst into being before the day set in, 

       and around a bend and through the switchbacks as the red dust turned our shoes brown and our legs pink, there snaked the Colorado river and it froze our feet and coated us in slick red mud but it was cool, and for a hot moment the sun burned out and then disappeared behind clouds and then we walked,

we walked

we walked

we walked

and it was my feet, my two feet, my dad, his two feet, our bodies moving through a place that only your feet can take you to, that only your feet can take you from, a step, a foot, forward and forward and forward; Dad said "most people I know will never be able to experience this", because of bodies or time or excuses or money, and it struck me, and we walked. 

    we have no pictures, really, from inside the Canyon because there was not time to walk and stop and take a picture instead of absorbing the space we were actually in, so we didn't, really, we just absorbed.

  towards the last four hours as we headed up and up the north rim, it began raining. The first hour was a refreshing cold on pained joints and sore knees, and the world converged in red rock walls and layers of sediment and design from whatever ancient nature used to be here, waterfalls floating off canyon cliffs and to a far-away ground, roaring springs, and the rain picked up, cold and pouring and turning the upwards trail into a waterfall and divets and creeks of collecting puddles of mud and mule shit and rainwater, running off and in makeshift streams, a year's worth of rain in an afternoon, and thunder, and lightning that cracked and a fog that crawled and snuck and swirled into a cold breath on the northern trees, higher and higher, legs that had to keep going and feet that trudged through the flood that rushed over the side of slick rock, fingers that clutched, damp, hiking poles and that creeping sense of cold and a heart as light as stars, for me, 
                    layers of sediment and colour and dips and valleys and views and cold and river and dust and rock and I was moved, moved to tears and beyond, my heart exploding, exploding from what exists on this fucking planet and embracing it, taking in to remember in the dull days this place, this moment, this now, all the tired and hurt and wet and cold, how our breath froze on the north rim and how it hitched and hiccuped for me not from exertion but from exhilaration, emotion, straight emotion pulled from my exhausted body and wide open soul. 

we arrived at the north rim around 5:30pm that night, our breath falling like ice from our lips, and of course there was yet another mile to walk to reach the lodge. we hitched a ride from a very kind couple whose names we never heard, shivering our way into the back of their RV and softly amazed at the kindness of people to pick up a soaking pair of hikers from the road. it was all we could do to check in at the lodge and then shed the soaking cloth and wrap ourselves in warm blankets. I was bursting, bursting with adrenaline, we made it, we did it, every damp and difficult last hour, every second under big clouds and crack of the sky and the falling rocks and the other world that exists, that exists so clearly in this world, this world of so much 


          that night the stars were the brightest stars I think I've ever seen, crystal and small and scattered and everywhere, everywhere the milky way glowing, between the trees the entire universe held between my eyes, my blistered hands, in my cold-air lungs and cramped feet and I

                                I was small, 
               and the world was infinite

the next morning was a slow sunrise and warm coffee with the whole of the canyon spreading in front of us
the next morning was a shuttle ride back, conversation toned down to public-travel-space volume levels 
the next morning was this:

and the road, and heading down to Sedona

the next afternoon was road trip pit-stops and hobbling between car seats to stretch in parking lots until we arrived in Sedona, in red rock country, and did this: 

to sit and sink and absorb what the land has to say, to heal, to set and feel

this is what the world can look like. 

on the plane home, I wrote again. 

I feel new, this way, and I cannot stop for all the time I'd need to know what it was that moved me, that kept me going, that made this happen. 

but we do, we keep going, it's what we do. 

and as new as I feel it is not a new of never-before but of again-and-again, the way I can write so much easier and freer than I could write these last two, three months, because I was away from where I was stuck, on a plane, in transit, and again I feel the way the world works through me now and it's a newness of return to this state of being, of going, of no longer hamster-cage-wheeling but of motion and different faces and red rocks and not-Canada and travel again, 
again I feel that newness that the road brings, that heady freedom, that release from the-same, again I am sinking into another layer of what it means to go, and again it is something different and something that has shaped me and something that has made itself a story in my life, folded tucked bruised flooded and pushed into me

here and now because I (am)(was) travelling, because I am not in the place where I left, because I am not in a place with all the people and conveniences of 'home' (not home but you know), because I only know how to write when I am like this, is it? how much it feels to be easy and right and better and flow, how flow it is to write now, and it is because the cogs of my being, unbearably light though they may be, are moving and turning and aware the way I can't be in Vancouver...

and I can only hope, I can only hope this won't be the last time I feel so much more able to write than I have of late, beyond summations of my days, that I am not hanging my life-hat of flow on travel/escape as the only place I can be down to the depths of my soul toes, that I can still find this flow after my feet hobble through international arrivals,  
and yet, 

this is the creative for me, right here, above the clouds and not touching down but delving, to what oxygen gives me new life to live, what words I feel shaken up inside me and rising, rising, rising to a new surface I thought I'd lost 

( i don't know where this surface goes when i stay where i am for too long )




x

-k

solo ida

It's funny because yesterday while I was train journeying from Osuna to Cadiz I wrote this long blog post with pictures and word lists to catch up on what has been happening since February 23, when I last wrote. 

And then this morning in the hostel I thought okay, let's post it, and then the Internet/universe did that thing where I suddenly lost it, all 1000ish words of it and pictures to boot. 

I have at long last learned my lesson and I am now going to forever write these blog posts elsewhere in a digital locale where I know my words just won't poof away into the ether regions of whatever online black hole it is that keeps doing this. 

So now I lay on a grassy spot close to the train station in Cadiz, on my way to Seville, where I will spend the next three nights and four days before I take the long long way home to Ljubljana. Long being a 7 hour train ride and 2 hour flight and 4 hour bus ride. 

It is a beautiful day, the palm trees waving their fronds lazily by a splashing fountain and a giant Spanish flag that ripples in the breeze. There are cruise ships pulled into the port here. It is Sunday, which likely means they are either beginning or ending. 

Cadiz is a beautiful slip of a town on the very edge of the continent. The ocean around us is blue, blue-green, dark blue, again and again, slapping gently the sides of ancient castles and walls built before the land known today as Canada was discovered. 

And wandering the streets you find magnificent university buildings and the wonder that is balcony and plazas and gardens, names and statues commemorated in their stout bust likenesses. 

Yesterday I fried myself on the beach, listening to the ocean and the Spanish rising up around me. The sun doesn't set here until later than 9pm, which makes pretty much every minute after 10am a reason for smart and UV-ray conscious people to seek shade. I did not. As such, I am crisped to another level, regardless of the sunscreen I did apply. (I promise Mom! It was just too scorching to avoid!) 

I have not been by myself with myself only me on a beach before, not quite like this. It's a really interesting experience--which, if we are being honest, actually applies to all solo travel. Finding an ideal place to situate yourself, providing snacks and drinks, grappling those hard to reach sunscreen spots (and ultimately failing, in my case), being alone with your thoughts. Alone with your thoughts and just yourself to amuse you. How in your head you get, but in a grounded sense, keeping you alert and focused and able to sink into who you are. In the quiet moments, drifting into memories that sort of glaze your eyes over, how you lose yourself in yourself. How much easier it is to see, a spy-glass perspective into what has come, what has brought you here as you, now, when you are so surrounded with such a new environment. 

Which is to say, I think that travel alone lends itself to a good deal of introspection balanced against (perhaps because of) the stimuli of new things. 

Which is to say, I'm going to take a moment to introspect here. 

It is May 4th. 

This is a day of departure for me. For the last two years I have been deliriously lucky enough to be going somewhere, places that have changed me. Two years ago it was Nicaragua. Last year it was Nepal. And this year I am in Spain. Although the alliteration doesn't quite flow, I am on the road ;)

So May 4th is special, because it is always the unknown and wavering and crazy beginning of things. And this May is an unknown and crazy beginning of (the end) the last full month I get to spend in Europe. 

Whoa. 

That. 

Nope. 

A bit of context:

I am coming from a week spent with my friend Mike and his parents and their family friends the Dartons (Kim and Sarah and Tom) in Osuna, a small white-walled town of convents and 16th -18th century buildings and friendly neighbours in the hills of Andalucía, having day tripped to Ronda (GORGEous), Cordoba (magical), and Seville (nice enough to return to, evidently, and soak in the gardens and palaces and cafes and horse-drawn carriages and all), listened to flamenco, played games (oh hell, the name game, bananagrams--Johnston family classics;), drank smooth Spanish vino tinto, enjoyed home cooked meals ft Spanish tomatoes, played on a football field, cheered for the local team, swam in crystal blue embalses, chatted till late, wondered about motivation and home and changes, read books, set the world right by twilight, ate ice cream, wandered, baked in the heat of the day, meandered to beautiful sunsets, stumbled across a white horse and heaps of greyhounds, became brown, laughed and laughed and laughed, indulged in coffee and chocolate, hugged, appreciated all the British wit (greatly), made music, felt how I have been here before, the magic of Spain and knowing this is one country I will return to, woke up to banjo playing, slammed words from the Oxford english dictionary, walked to old ruins, remained overwhelmed by the beauty and magic of moments like this one: 

and the stars, and how the sun did not set until so wonderfully late and how warm it was, and easy, and kind to be wrapped into family. Not to mention how very close I was to Vancouver, closer even then when I was in Toronto at Christmas. Because now Mike, who yesterday I hugged, is today back in Vancouver, has stories to tell and this kind of closeness that comes from a week spent together now and also the fact that I could say "see you soon", and it is. It is really soon, about a month and a half. 

Nope. 

What. 

And what makes that impossible is what has happened in the last few weeks of my being here. 

And what has happened in the last few weeks of my being here is this:

It is the 11th hour, pretty much, of my time abroad. I thought I had a pretty stable understanding of what the feels would be upon leaving. Mostly that it wouldn't be impossible or painful or much of that shattering kind of thing. I figured yeah, hey, it will be strange and difficult and bittersweet to go, but at least there is so much in Vancouver waiting for me that eh, I should be okay. 

And not that there is anything less in Vancouver (still a job and classes and friends from a year ago with whom I must catch up), but that now there is this very present and real anchor for me here. 

As Erasmus students, we all kind of recognize each other as floating and unattached from the location where we met and got to know each other, being as we are not from there. Ljubljana is not my home, is not his or her home or any of ours, only in the temporary sense. And up until a few weeks ago, I didn't know Slovene students enough to root me and say yeah, this is my home, here is my life, here I am as an anchor, a face and voice and laughter to know this place by. So my heart was all hey, this is fine, it's been a slice LJ and I know you'll always matter as a place I have lived and experienced for 9 months but it's not exacting or sharp or anything specific. 

And then, well, I got to know a number of Slovene students. And they have rooted me and grounded me in Slovenia as a place they grew up and call home and they have said, by way of late nights chatting and drinking wine and comparing culture and language and sharing experiences and opinions and memories and ideas, by passing hilarious notes and exchanging sassy messages and drinking beverages together and eating meals together and spending time: here we are as faces and names and lives you will never be able to shake from your experience of Ljubljana, will not be able to avoid when it comes to thinking of Slovenia. 

That all happened because we have a class together, our UN simulation course, wherein we have to interact as delegates and what have you, which means we just generally get to interact with each other. Which has led to this, first as faces in a classroom, then country names, then Facebook friends and then becoming real friends and now I'm here with this unexpected slew of great people of whom I am so fond and I'm looking around like really? Really heart, you had to go and get attached? 

You just had to go and find foxes in the desert and tame each other and become responsible for the things you have tamed and because you have to go you will probably cry but at least the wheat fields will always remind you and what

how does it always come back to the Little Prince 

except of course it does. 

This is why I get a feeling of nervous laughter tightening around my insides when I notice that it is May 4th. That I said "see you soon" to Mike. That five months have somehow passed since 2014 began, that this is how the year always flies, no time, just absolutely no time to breathe. 

Or, at least, by the time I do breathe, it just keeps going. So really all I can do is just keep breathing and just keep going right along with it. 

Something like that. 

Okay, so that's that, so now you know how much more difficult time has become for me. As a kind of impossible inevitability. Like, I know I cannot stay. I know I will leave. And I know I will have to say goodbye to all the people I've met and enjoy so damn much. And I know I will likely not see everyone again, and I know we will stay in touch, vaguely, over the years. And this is inevitable, that the leaving will happen. And it is also impossible, because it is just so much good right now, because things make me happy, these people make me happy. It is impossible because my heart is throwing itself against the wall knowing that there's nothing really to be done now but keep going. Nothing but to embrace the time I do have, and then moving when I have to. 

And it will feel impossible for a long time after, and that echoing ache will resound through me in those punching kind of memories, and yet, time will keep going. Life will keep going. We will keep going. 

I think Buddha really had it right, how attachment causes suffering. 

But I will, I think, always take that suffering if it means that there had been an attachment, a taming, a connection in the first place. 

Better to have loved and lost then never loved at all, right? 

Better to have the knowledge of laughing stars and desert oases, to have known the Little Prince and the consequent grief of losing him, then nothing at all, right? 

Something like that. 

I'm getting simultaneously too mushy and too grand, I see that. 

Let's continue. 

Picking up where I left off, arriving back from Portugal back in February...

I arrived back in Ljubljana and the next day picked my sister Valerie up from the airport for a visit and the next day we went to Venice for the weekend and it was wonderful, her whole visit was just fantastic on account of that feeling of waiting for my family to arrive at the airport so I can show her around my new home, the place I've been living in some other part of the world. My family. Because living on your own and being halfway around the world can be a bit of a thing and make you alone, and it is always comforting to be hugged again by family, reminded you are part of something, of several someones, and this never changes. Love you family. Thank you for letting me go and reminding me where to return. 

We chatted about life, walked around the town, visited Lake Bled and the Postojna caves and the LJ castle, ate chocolates and watched shows together, generally just enjoying the time together. A lot because I'm never home, but also now we are all of us siblings moved out of the house and no longer living together, which makes all our together moments that much more precious. 

Classes started and Valerie left and eventually I got into the swing of things, meeting some of the great new Erasmus students. And that nameless UBCer from my last post? He is Matt, and certainly one of my really great friends now, being able to experience Slovenia anew with him, exchanging UBC stories, speaking Vancouver-talk to each other. I am very glad he's here, and that we will be back at UBC together. It makes the experience, at least semester two of it, so much more real. Very glad being an understatement, but this is just a small shout out to many many hours and things and times together. You Matt. Yes you. 

Irene turned 22, Matt turned 21, a slew of March birthdays and goodness. I saw Angelique Kidjo on the first day of March, a Saturday, and missed places I have not yet known. And then we, Irene and I, went to Istanbul. 

This was Istanbul:

of colours and scents and damp running shoes and takin pictures and people watching you and dark eyes and teasing smiles and how it feels like this kind of thing has maybe always happened in the history of the world, spice markets and sweets for sale and these rich and intense colours and maybe it is just the infrastructure that creates these spaces that changes and maybe the clothing of the vendors but this, I loved this, was so captivated by it

after taking the public transit on a dark and rainy evening, getting off the tram at sultanahmet stop, lights of the street and restaurants shiny against gold casings holding Turkish desserts, no bearing and no idea where yet we are going, the call to prayer sounds out around us. And it wavers and sinks around the sounds of the Friday evening and it was so far from anything I've heard growing up, and I felt how far I was, how foreign I was, and something made sense then that has never made sense before, something below words and deeper than them, something beyond me

one of my favourite things of all the places we visited and especially in all the mosques is the script, the Arabic flowing on the ceilings and walls in inscriptions and designs, gold or blue or green or red against the tiles and candles. Looking at it, head tilted in awe, I feel like I am standing on the doorstep of a culture, a religion, a history I have not heard before in its own nuance and grit, a story and many stories that the west doesn't do right, does not do justice. And I know that I have to go further. The taste that Istanbul has given me of Islam is, I feel, just the beginning of that which I would like to learn, to know. 

   For a while I've had this seed of desire to travel to the Middle East, to see and learn and know and create for myself an understanding of such a part of the world that is so mis-portrayed back home. And for me, what I do know of Islam, a religion of peace, feels much safer of a space then what I've encountered in Catholicism. And I think the aesthetics are way more beautiful--mosques, minarets, design and architecture, from the Moors in Spain to the Muslims in Sarajevo. 

 (also I don't want to fight religion over the Internet, so please ask me personally more on this if you want.) 

Upon getting home and doing classes and meetings an discussions and things, my feet fell out from me when the ground gave away when the world carpet burned me again. I questioned what I was doing and how and what I was learning and how and the institutions I was learning in and of and about. I ranted. I was exhausted. It is a familiar tired, now, how the world just needs to shut off and stop it and I am crushed by the weight of how things are and how small I am. It is also, and I recognize this, the biggest privilege to be tired from this, this analyzing and seeing from the outside; it means I do not exactly have to face it, be actually crushed instead of intellectually and emotionally so. I am a step removed from it, in some ways--perhaps just in my head, that faux-shield that academia grants you, and all of this just adds up. 

But the city got sunny and 20degrees so I sat by the river and tried not to think or at least just to look up and breathe and all. 

I spent a weekend at home and then the next weekend in March, we went to Bosnia. We being Matt, Irene, Dominika from Slovakia and I hopped in a car and off we went. 

This was Bosnia:

Sarajevo

a history so present it is hard to call it past, a city that remembers, that is recovering, that is so old and new at the same time, a dividing line of collision for east and west and the people's peace and how politics intersect everything. 

Oh, and this most wonderful moment where we wandered into a small shop across from the mosque and the nicest Muslim lady ever, pregnant as the day is young, invites us in and finds us beautiful things, a translation of a Quran page for Matt and snapshot postcards and she keeps apologizing for her English but we are smiling so deeply, and just as we leave she tells us we can take gifts. Small bracelets of prayer beads, 33 or 99, held in a precious little bag and amber coloured or black or green and she tells us to have a nice day and we walk out of there half in love with what just happened, these small kindnesses, this welcome and patience. 

After a morning of Bosnian coffee and baklava, wandering the streets and passing mosques and churches and cathedrals and synagogues, we found ourselves again in the old town, strolling past shops of all these knicks and knacks of neat pieces of cultural heritage, the afternoon sunshine filtered by striped awnings. One shop caught my eye, filled with such beautiful copper plates and cups and those special sets for making Turkish/Bosnian coffee. We enter, greeted by the grey haired man hunched over his tools, paused in the process of making the coffee sets. And it turns out he is a UNESCO world heritage artist. 

Life. 

After one of the best free walking tours I've ever been on led by a charismatic guide with the most mesmerizing blue-grey eyes ever, we left early the next day for the town of Mostar, driving a most unexpected journey of mountains and reservoir rivers and charming small villages. Arrived just before the sun started to set and by the time we found our hostel, the sun was going down. Oh but what a town! A beautiful bridge spans a blue river, connecting the pieces of the town, which is old and cobblestoned and precious as anything, just asking to be wandered slowly and with laughter on our tongues, unimaginably delighted with it all. 

We stopped in Medugorje on the way back up to Slovenia, and took a coffee in Split, Croatia. Our drive back was conversation and music handed around under lightning storm skies and foggy-breath windows, cradled by the laughter and awe of the weekend. 

and after Bosnia the weather stayed sunny in Ljubljana and I didn't write essays or do things but I had conversations and potluck dinners and the kind of living stuff that reminds me how cool it is to be a youth hanging out with other youths from other places, and then I missed a bus and caught a train and missed another bus and caught a different bus to Berlin. 

This was Berlin:

I remember the day we parted, in April of my first year at UBC, almost exactly two years ago. We had had lunch at Burgoo, and by the bus stop we said goodbye. It was raining in that slow April way, and I said to Maneo and Kui, I wonder when we'll see each other again, and it was my first encounter with those kinds of goodbyes. Two years later I arrive in Berlin and there is Lisa in the bus station and she has a more pronounced Scottish accent and we hug for a long time. Proceed to the coolest flat ever, and tea and chats and wine and touring around and Vietnamese lunch and beers and live music and Mauerpark and flea markets and cool postcards and movies and time passing and Sunday clubs and the city by night and this city, Berlin. 

The wall

is something you cannot avoid. It is everywhere, the largest scar, the largest testament to this history if you cannot already read it from the stories of everyone around you. It was amazing to actually be in the presence of something you always hear about, the Berlin Wall. To see images you probably know by now, to know it was there, to stand in all your small humanity before it and know it was humans who built this. 

And humans who tore it down. 

One of my favourite feelings was walking up the street to the agreed upon meeting spot and recognizing Michael standing there, crossing the street and embracing Ndey again, such a beautiful bonus of a thing to spend time together and laugh and trade stories. To remember that we are not just passing lives, to know how things can continue, how we get to keep going with our lives in such a way that it is not impossible to see each other again. To take ourselves out of the context in which we've known each other and pick up. 

And so that goodbye, with Michael and Ndey, and the next morning with Lisa, was a strange echo to the first goodbye on that rainy April day two years ago, another of those see you sometime and that sometime could be whenever, could be never again. And it is okay this way. We will find each other when our paths are next meant to. 

What a feeling. 

And getting back from Berlin at 2 in the morning on a Wednesday, I set up base camp in Matt's apartment, pretty much, and then did ALL OF THE THINGS for school. In about 36 hours, I wrote about 4000 words for 3 different papers, sat a midterm exam after some form of studying, participated in our mock session, stayed up again till 2 to write the draft paper, and all around just motored through a whole bunch of academia. 

The Thursday evening after getting back, everything safely handed in, it was all I could do not to collapse. My oh my. That weekend I caught up on sleep and home base back in Canada, and then began our week of the last few weeks mentioned above, because it was opening session time and that meant a huge upswing of the heart. 

On the Easter weekend, aside from Matt and I practicing being roommates, we celebrated the holiday Monday Danish style--cold dishes, shots of vodka, and lots of beer. One of those days that begins in the afternoon and when you lock your door leaving your house you think 'I have no idea where this night may end', and indeed it winds through the hours and takes you places so that when you arrive home at 3 in the morning, you laugh at yourself for how these things go. 

And then it was just managing to stay on top of things and drinking mimosas at breakfast before class and then suddenly Thursday night rolled around and I found myself having to pack and gather documents for coming here. 

Here being the south of Spain for vacation time, and what a wonderful time it was. 

I left my apartment at 4:30am to get to the bus station with gratuitous amounts of time left. As I was walking in the pre-dawn darkness, the birds were chattering like it was high tea time, pretty and musical and surprising for so early in the morning. As I was walking in the pre-dawn darkness, a route I've taken so often now, I had a feeling. 

(congratulations, you had a feeling!) a feeling that rises and once you feel it you can't unfeel it: how I am going to miss this. This in the moment, for the week I'd be away, and also this as in all of it, what is now familiar and comfortable and some sort of home for me. And I was surprised I had that feeling--usually I am so focused on what's ahead I don't notice the place I am leaving. Not unless this place has some kind of hold on me (cough Vancouver, South Africa, Nepal cough). That I noticed I was leaving Ljubljana, not just going to Spain, rang a small alarm bell in my heart, that Ljubljana has a hold on me. 

And maybe that's what it is this whole time, all those thoughts on how I felt and how that changed. I am no longer just returning to Vancouver, upon which I was fairly focused, but also leaving here. 

I'm not sure I'm telling this right, or if it makes much sense at all. Or if you are rolling your eyes and banging your head against the wall for home much I talk about this leaving business. Send me a message or something if you'd rather I just didn't. And I would apologize for how very vague and unspecific I am in writing things here, but if you know me enough to read this, you probably know me enough to get it. 

One thing Mike said to me in a late night chat was just how much I don't take things for granted in the places I find myself and in my travels, something along those lines. And that's what I've inked on my body, how to realize this journey, this life, in every, every minute--or at least as close as you can get. 

So in the time we've got left, I think I will lose myself in just that: being here. 

Bring on the late nights and red wine and dancing and classes and reading and essays and picnics in Tivoli and Slovenian sunshine and Prešeren square in summertime and church bells and cobblestones and rivers and roads, rivers and roads, rivers till I reach you. 

x

-k