two

months since I last wrote. 

I'm lying on a squishy couch in a flat in Lisbon because outside the world decided to rain windy rain, so it's a casual afternoon in this ridiculous saga of life. 

I read over, not really meaning to, my first blog post from just after being in Slovenia for 24 hours.

It's so funny what time does, how it feels to look back on the beginning at now what is the halfway point, ish. Though technically I've already passed the 6 months gone, 6 months to come, there is a kind of heart swell in thinking when next I'm in Canada I will be in Vancouver. Also just that it's a sliding scale now where I get to live these next months with nothing left to climb away from a return. Those were feelings, at some point. 

And there are new Erasmus students coming in now, messages and emails about orientations and first dinners and all, and it makes me smile the way it made me smile to return in second year, feeling how I know things now and there is a whole new world about to begin for others. Which I think would be a really nice way of putting it, not that I am halfway to finished now, but that I get to begin again, new students and new classes and a pretty much new apartment. I can't really believe it, to be honest. Imagining this February as it is, knowing so clearly where I was last February, thinking of all that time that has elapsed since. 

I received a message from another UBC student who will be in Ljubljana next (this?) semester, which had me thinking of all those beginning things again. And the fact that I'm in Portugal right now, after a whirlwind stay in Spain, the fact that I could do it like this because of people I've met and friends I have now, because of the last 4, 5 months we have spent together, because I've been abroad for a long while now. 

Because I'm living somewhere longer in these next six months in Slovenia for one unbroken stretch of time than I've lived anywhere since leaving home for Vancouver. 

Here's what two months have been. 

Amsterdam, which was after a tour in Brussels with a tour guide I would have greatly enjoyed conversation with, history and politics and a country I never really thought of before, aside from chocolate and a French project I did in grade 6. Amsterdam was perfect timing, and finding a Nepali restaurant and saying namaste again like that and eating dhal with my hands, smiling, wandering the streets after and rounding corners and running into Liam and friends and then coffeeshops and red lights and nights and chocolate waffles and then a warm hostel bed with the sounds of bumping clubs. Amsterdam was seeing Kirsten on this side of the world and sharing that, an afternoon, an evening, a breakfast, a goodbye for another 6 months. Amsterdam was metros and buses, and then missing my flight, but working it out anyways. 

I landed in Venice and got a phone call about scholarships and for the last time took a bus from the bus station home to my apartment. 

Because then I moved apartments, and rescheduled my bus routes, but I'm in the city centre true now, so it has reoriented me and I love it. 

I love it, above the convenience, also for the freshness of it. The new bit. The second start. The totally solo move, the totally solo decision, the clean walls with no emotions and nothing attached, especially for the next chunk of time there. 

And Ljublj turned her lights on, and the nights got chilly but not freezing towards Christmas, and I got tired. I got tired in late nights and Skype dates and morning songs and presentations, last minute things I've known forever, and I got tired in classrooms and conversations and infuriating professors. I got rattled, leaked, couldn't breathe, couldn't sleep, and then started over again. Tired and checked in and checked up and last holiday dinners and last holiday white wines. 

And then the customs officer said "welcome home" after looking at my passport, getting off the plane from Frankfurt to Toronto, returned for the holidays. 

And I blinked strangely at that, those words welcome home, and I didn't know what to think, and I understood every conversation around me because it was all in English, and I couldn't focus on words because everyone else was speaking them. 

and then my family happened for Christmas, in a new house in the city, and we were all there again after more than six months being everything else, and it was unreal, probably just the best, to be bantering as we do, playing music and eating cereal and joking and tinking cutlery and making drinks and everyone again together, because all our lives are no longer close. That's a strange thing. That is a beautiful thing. 

I got to see people again. 

I got to do things with people again. 

It was nice, because it happened. Because it gave us all a little bit more, because I have no idea when it is going to happen again, truly. 

Celebrated New Years outside breathing frosty air and surrounded by thick-jacket bodies and fireworks that never ended and that kind of exhilaration of people and people and a reason to celebrate, the way everyone calls out to each other and loves it all, at least for a night. 

On the first day of 2014 I watched The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and somewhere between the soundtrack and the story, I knew it was going to mean something, and it did, and my mom asked me "that bus was like the ones in Nepal, huh?" and then I had to lock myself in the movie theatre bathroom and sob into a clenched fist, silent, for the emotions that overwhelmed me. I don't know what it was, what it is that did that. Just that it was. 

I thought--life is not so dramatic.

But it is not that. 

It is just being alive, and being places. 

And then there was Once, and live music, and best friends, and cold hugs and breath for goodbyes. 

And then there was this 

another Skype that saw me through the night into the morning and the words I wish I could be there, and the words you will be and the fact that this year I will be. What that means. 

And then there were giggles and sisters and a last night to puddle on a bed and be silly because now we're growing out, not of each other but of a shared space, and what that will become, no idea. 

And then there were hugs and snowstorms and a flight back. To return. 

It was 9 degrees when I arrived in Slovenia. 

I paid my bills and didn't do essays and couldn't sleep, for a long long time, and I caught up on Venezuela adventures and then saw everyone together on the same screen in the same room and that was weird and that's all I will say, and then I debated on the responsibility to protect and shut the fuck up, you condescending shitty professor dean, and then I booked a flight to Istanbul because deals and then train tickets in Spain and Portugal for exam break. 

It snowed, and kept snowing. 

January was all of that and returning and settling and letting time do its thing and messages and chats and lunches and the library but not enough of it, really not sleeping and studying in a very loose sense of studying, salsa dancing bars and that delight, coffees and laughter, tripping off of buses and hilarious mistakes on the dancefloor, and squeezing out squeezes in the self-imposed exile of everyone from everyone else that comes from exam times. 

And then it was quickly time for goodbyes for the beautiful people I've grown stupidly fond of in the time we've had, and goodbyes that got bonus time and at night on street corners and doorsteps, and I walked away and didn't know how to feel about knowing people I might not see again, and then, it is not even that intense, really. 

We are all just people-ing along in our mistakes and joys and sometimes we fall in line and sometimes out of line and it is always okay. I have to believe it will work out the way it is supposed to. 

***

And now I am sitting in the Lisbon airport finishing these thoughts. I've just spent two weeks travelling through two countries I certainly never thought I would get to see, not this time anyway, and I am absolutely enchanted, Spain and Portugal, February weather aside. 

It looked like this, for all that I didn't actually have a proper camera in my hands for most of it:

my deliriously happy train ride from Barcelona to Valencia. I'd not ridden a train proper before, and this was in Spain, by the coast, at sunset. Good first time, I'd say. 

this is my first paella cooked over an open fire outside at Irene's country house just outside Alcoy, and it was delicious, and surrounded by happy chatty laughing loud energetic Spanish friends, and we sat in the chilly house (not heated, and situated in a beautiful but windy crook) and it was all kinds of home in all these different ways, and I sat in a quiet kind of place and watched and laughed and listened. 

and this is the next day's lunching spot, where I could see the sea, after wandering a castle with all these buena vistas, before discovering the white walls and sunset of Altea, and looking out over how beautiful and fragrant this country is, I tried to breathe it in to the forgetful bits so as to keep it there for days I dream of travelling again. 

Spanish beers and flowing conversations in a square courtyard with those glowing warm streetlamps, and I love where life goes sometimes, and this is it. 

and then I was in Madrid on a slanty rain kind of afternoon and this just. I think my eyes became plates the size of paella platters to absorb all of it--including the gastronomic delights of the mercado and these buildings and what. How even. 

this was upon arriving in Cais do sodre in Lisbon. 

O, Lisbon, you city of lovers and streetlamps and cobblestone, poets and fado hidden and rising in corners of blue-white tiles and viewpoints--you rainy spectacle of sunshine and sea spray and old trams and discoveries

and people, whose homes open into yours and so easily we can be under verandas and sprawling trees and speak of things that matter and not and say grand things, say we know love and we don't know, have hope and cynicism and clap after jazz jam sessions and the wuiet of nighttime on weekdays and see the moon; it tastes like olive oil in the mornings and the way we sit in kitchens and open balcony doors and hold our hands out windows and feel cool pushing air and know the sight of rain to come and how it is so good, this

and I know even now I can't do it justice, this quick turnover of timetables and places, and I need some quiet moments just to let myself know it has all happened. 

We are landing soon 

and you know what happens then? 

We get the chance to keep going. 

I like that. 

-k