bookends

"This bookend summer of the world I've had this year has split me open and spilled over the ink on my pages, on my skin, Nepal and home and in between and South Africa, and what. sorry. How did this end. this was never even supposed to happen, was never supposed to be a plan that actually happened. 

and then life went and did this thing where it happened."

 like how I left South Africa.

 But before that, how Nepal happened. And then camp, after graduations and congratulations and old friend conversations. How I will not see your faces for a year or so starting now, Adriana and Daniela and Kelsey, Erin. How my brother is moving out. How student visas are stamped into my passport. 

How I missed a flight only to arrive. 

How I arrived, Jozi, Joburg. Maneo. And mum and Tshepiso and Gran and the Greenhouse, all now, all just now. 

How 51a became home, and nights on couches and idols extra and MasterChef South Africa and ancient aliens and so you think you believe you like to gyrate and tea and heaters. How the morning shutters rolled up and light burst in with the garden and the Greenhouse for Saturdays. How we walked through a corner of Leondale and the dust covered my shoes in wintery sunlight and how warm we make the house, all of us and the soccer match. Sesotho, rolling, lovely, warm around me. How we bought cookbooks and boots and told how this happened here, that was where, that was where. How we stayed until the lights shut off in the apartheid museum, 1989 and fill in the details of after in an empty parking lot, sitting on a curb and the sunset in our eyes. Conversations on race. Impossibility and flipsides of spectrums and mindsets and frames and location. How my feet were cold and how Dad found me slippers. How we ended our evenings together. 

How names from stories became people, in my life now. Reminiscing around kitchen tables and talking evolution and not baking for the shady boys but food is there all the same, and rusks and rusks, tea and rusks. How the doorbell rang for Eric and we missed it. Gangster sounds for the night drive to 012, and candles hanging in Afrikaans cafes--coolest or cruelest?--and high speed reverse car driving, dining and dashing and drinking. 

How I met Tayla at the theatre and chats were had, chats everywhere and all the time, deep chats and light chats and life chats and long chats and joke chats, walk the talk chats and naps. Given me a sense of how this goes, was, is, unlike anything I've ever lived. How I never expected this. 

Benoni and wide land and township houses and hospital visits and this is day by second by every minute my family now. Mugg and Bean afternoon and I think I know the sound of the ground beneath my feet, where we walk in the kitchen, bake bread. 

Driving past places and through places, breakfasts and lunches, the men in the middle of the streets selling adapters and art work, car guards and shup shup, proteas in flower shops and the Sandton jungle-city and rich people and doorsteps and inescapable inequality and the colours of the South African flag now. 

Mason jars of juice and holding hands in shopping malls and remembering, who we are. 

Cape Town flight with spacious seats and landing and green, a lot of it, the salt in the air and knowing the sound of it on your lips. Forgetting how much the ocean is and means, just across it, just over that horizon, not but still the same horizon I've lived with for two years now and knowing you are just there, Francis and Sean and Chloe. 

Five story houses and elevator lifts and a mountain there and everywhere is just ocean, a carpet meant to be high on, headboards made for hands and hysterics on couches, cappuccinos and whirlwind driving. Winding roads and scenic routes by the ocean at sunset, twelve apostles and lionshead and table mountain. All the niceness and then college gritty, Sibi and her amazing crowd, and I love it, long vodka conversations by the fridge, race and politics and where you come from and language and 30 seconds. 

Hand twitches and walks on beaches and tea in the afternoon turned wine by evening and silence, words around you, deep chats for Friday nights, Saturday mornings on the waterfront turned entire day, views and aquariums and pregnant spaces. Kyle and Non and Shiraz, crashing on mattresses and windy nights, long mornings of tea and grey skies, house mates and guinea pigs. 

Afternoons of feet under blankets and reading and naartjies on account of colds, shining and unsettled, Tshepang and macaroons and magazines, Afrikaans which I cannot speak. Vooooooooete. Paris and theatre and language and the power of the stage again. Tea and chats, can you notice a theme here?, dark drives and late nights. 

Rainy days and company gardens and the butcher boys, art and then sweet wine, the sky still light out after the Labia. Mabu vinyl. Chilli hot chocolate and rain that lashes around nighttime street lamps, shadows of plants and moving hands. 

Chakras and life lessons by the seaside, splash and jump and play in cold Atlantic water, squelch feet into sand and drip sea salt. Gatsby parties and champagne and last nights in places. Breakfast and Kenny and colourful homes and Astros and lunch bars, take us home on a plane and the Jozi sunset fills the whole sky, talk of goodbye because we are not good for it, and when we get home, I can smell home in the air, and I think I know now. 

Last week, days, practical pranks that are not so, movie times and forehead kisses and The Phantom Tollbooth, cake and days and about/out/house, not a countdown, jazz that steals all of the air in my lungs, don't make me move on , and then it is. 

"Go well". 

Zebras and springbok, charcoal for the braai, playing crocodile. Breath on car window glass, "bye Kelllllyyyyyy". 

Polo and all the pretty people, cozy up on the couch (fitting) and look up look up look up, don't stop no don't cry I won't and I do, into the morning and around the corner and so much. 

Blink...blink...blink. 

I don't know where this time went and I don't know how I'm writing this in another metal tube returning to the country of origin. I don't know how I left and I don't know how I'm gone. 

I don't know when these weeks escaped or what to do with myself and I am leaking emotions in public places and I would apologize if it mattered more what I look like, but everything now has happened. 

I left my family on Monday, and standing in line for the first leg of the flight to Frankfurt I bit my knuckle to keep from sobbing and wrote messages for the people who are people in my life now, and I realized that this is it this is it this is it, what I hung my hat of summer on has already happened. 

Leaving this time was impossible (no thanks to Eric, whose mixed tape of the day we met and Pretoria tapes are writing this with me) because it is the last leave, the final goodbye, the end of an impossible four months that I could not believe had actually happened. And now I will be back in Canada and I will have empty days to fill with work and writing and words and yoga and trying not to miss what I will not be there for and looking for housing across an ocean. 

I'm so very now that even that doesn't exist. And all the tears for now are not in fear or regret of what's to come, but literally are        just         for         now. I'm not sure how far I can look ahead at all because now is just now. All I've got is now. (excepting transit times like this. this is my empty space in an unreal metal tube that doesn't count as reality, lets me wander through thoughts and words and on-flight movies)

So I think I'm going to place this bookend of my life back where it came from and try to twist this leaving into the rest of what's to come, as much as is possible to avoid any sense of end. We are not ending, ever....just moving. There is not a left behind but a let go, a let go that moves with it into a different space and different place still housed by the same love and stretched and moulded. 

Before I get away with this, I will leave it here. Wonder at the happen-status of this life and never understand how it is that this works. 

there is rain on the roof of home in Canada and I can hear it, watch it drip green and grey from the window, enough for now to see how very much I don't know how to be here, how I miss the words and the life that told me

            I will see you just now. 

-k

....weeks?

Haha

so the last post I said see you on the other side, and currently I have one week between me and being back to where I wrote that, same side (?), so I'd better give words and things a chance to be words and things on this...side. 

I guess by other side I mean of the world, and by the world I mean opposite hemispheres, because what was north is now south and I haven't been somewhere where the stars are so different and look, there is no Big Dipper in the sky. 

I forgot what sky looks like. 

It goes on forever. 

The sunset can sink slowly and wide and it just grins away the time as the seconds  tick unevenly between clocks. No, I swear, this isn't me being obtuse or poetic or what what (............haaaaaa) but the sunset here is spilling and  spread, bread and butter. Like the sunset in the empty parking lot of the apartheid museum. Or the colours that leaked out behind the golden mosque, under construction, on our way home. Or the clotheslines and roofs over which the sunset in Leondale sinks. Or the way the sky closed slowly on the flight back from Cape Town, and leaving, and electrical wires, and who I am where I am, any more. 

So. 

Five weeks, or something, this has happened. People have happened. Conversations, tea, music, car rides, difference and laughter and race and family. (i will get political one day, will make sense of this one day) Gardens and colours and breakfast and bright lights in the sky and books, rhyme and reason and dreams. 

ilovethissomuch, every bit and piece and blister and sting and cough and sniffle, stubbed toe and sad things and good things, all the things. All the people. 

So, here. Take this. No need to return it.

*hands over a giant bundle of love* 

-k

missed connection

So in another reality I would not even be capable of writing this. I should be somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean right now, or else landed in Johannesburg already. 

For some reason I still have not figured out yet, I was not meant to get on that plane to Jo'burg, me and five others. Our flight from Toronto to Washington was unbelievably delayed, asking us to deplane while they tried to fix the a/c. I'm grateful that heat does not seem to bother me too much any more, because did it ever swelter for a bit there. Everyone's tempers were short and tense via angry phone calls and advice of "give them hell". 

For all that I wish I could have arrived on time, the whole delay did not cause me much panic. I'm pretty zen these days...also I have six weeks in South Africa, so I don't need to lose sleep over a night. 

And lose sleep I certainly did not, as this hotel that the airline put us up in is NICE. One of the options on the "hotel services" page of the welcome guide was horseback riding. 

Yeah. 

Okay. 

This is my view from my window 

which was pretty for the hour of day light I had left when I arrived here. 

I spent the night just decompressing, watched some GoT. 

Orange water, anyone? 

Life sometimes eh? 

I'm going to go spend the rest of my hour left here down by the poolside, perhaps, enjoy this bonus day of sunshine while I still can, because my next reality is a metal tube flying through atmosphere for 17 hours. 

I'm gladly taking suggestions on why I am here for the time being, why I didn't make it last night. 

Or maybe like most things in life, it is just a matter of things that happen and it is nothing more than a missed connection. 

So now I want to ask how many other connections have there been in my life that I've missed...willfully or not. 

I'll see you all on the other side. 

-k

and and and

hello june.

this happened on the seventh day.

I thought I should try and say something about this.

....

But I can't, I don't know how to, I don't know if I can, not yet, because I live, lived it. The most I have is to read back over what May did for me and try and turn that into some kind of ache in the heart that tastes like sunburns and sunsets and dancing and darkness. That's what I know, starlight and streetlight and midnight and bridges and quiet green and funkdirty and leaving.

...

hello july.

I am now 20.
maybe I shouldn't have told you that for the sake of the internet not knowing these things, but naah. f*ck it.
(wow, look how polite I'm being.
no guarantees of such attempts in the future)
but I am also on another evening of suitcase zipping and clothing rolling, pushing and packing and hoping for everything to be where it needs to, because tomorrow I am back at the airport and tomorrow I am en route for 2 hours to Washington and then 17 hours to Johannesburg.

SAY WHAT.

The month I've had not on airplanes has been (           wish there was a word                ), in seeing friends that I never see but will continue to always never see and it will be okay, in laughing with my brother and getting around the last two years, in frozen yogurt and conversations, in not making up and not making over but in making it through, in daily music, in playlists and car rides and graduations.....
in camp.

Ah.

Yeah.

Kretinga.

Two weeks of if only you could be there. Of radioactive, of skuuuuunks and pringles and cups of green tea and pb&js, dances and singing, nutella... of spiders and stay and same love and clutching and laughing, of beach preaches and confident walks and dressing up and hallelujah, of pirates and mad hatters and words and raspberries. Of 5 ams, and hearts, and crazy pants. Two weeks of sunrises and sunsets and siestas and southbound trains, cats that came back, midnight, elephants, whistles.

All I have left to say for it is iki pasimatymo. There is nothing I can do or speak or write or think that can cover what it is, what it was, so I will leave it to what it will be, another year of time that maybe is and maybe is not as real as those two weeks, but they are all we've got. Oh, and that's the hardest part.

I don't know anything, and least of all what will happen next.


So I will leave you here with thoughts on wagon wheels and leftover incense on prayer flags and how time never listens, how time never slows, how time never exists the way it wants to, needs to.

so this is for new borders and old friends and old beginnings and new ends and and and

stay

-k

the last things or so

I don't know what to call this post so I am telling you this here because I am writing this first and whatever the title is, just know that its creation and delivery has come after whatever is about to be written here. Which I also don't know what it will be but that's how I write this anyways, all together and at once with the words and thoughts being same-same, same tempo, same rhythm, slowed only by transliterating synapses to syllables.

So.

This is our porch view from Jungle Heaven and I put it here because do you see the small pathway? Right, good, so think about pathways and walking and adventures, because part two of our weekend was a jungle safari, fording the same river as our elephant ride and passing the lightning tree and two of our guides sandwiched the white girls so we didn't get lost although there were branching trails around us. We walk-ran run run run ran-walk-runrunrun-walked our way to viewing point one to see a tiger but we just missed it, sweat pouring from our bodies, looking like we were taking river baths sit rhinoceroses. We hiked through grasses taller than our heads, me at the back being dampened by everyone else's sweat that stuck to it and white sandy patches of trail were heat waves of hot, shoes squelchy and wet. Arrived at a second viewpoint and this was "time to be patient because lots of tourists are like rush and go but you need to listen and wait", said our guide with the long singular dreadlock down the back of his head. We sat in the dirt and practiced squishing ants as huge flies buzzed around us. Our body temperatures finally slowed down,  no longer drip drip dripping sweat, more like a steady sheen. Eventually we got adventurous and me, Vita and Bailey climbed the lookout point tree and our guides and Dinesh called us monkeys and laughed in breathy whispers to not scare the suppose tigers. It was awesome. Breeze through the leaves, dappled sunshine, slight sway. I closed my eyes, wedged my leg in a branch gap and hooked my arm above me and could have slept. 

No tigers in sight but deer and birds and tree climbing sufficed, rhinos in the distance and lookout points and epic heat and a bonus river swim at the end. Rivers, I have decided, are the most refreshing. Much appreciated. 

And on our ride home, crossing a bridge by foot so as to spot the crocodiles (which we did) there were also wild elephants on the other side. I wish I could have captured that view for you, the low wide river and river bushes and hills sloping steeply behind it and two elephants, huge and ear flappy, eating in the centre patch of grasses, timeless, amazing, full of grace of the animal kingdom sort. 

Deep breaths, finger snapping appreciation for planet earth. And temperature.

My right hand looks this now, from Wednesday.

The girl (Omvica) who did it charged us way too much but she chattered in English and was 15 and could speak French and Spanish and a bit of Thai and good Chinese and English and Hindi and Nepali and she smiled and said I want to make it beautiful for you and the ink smelled like tea tree leaves and something else good and fresh. 

Afterwards Nura took us to buy saris (sarees) and it was a four part process of wrap and fabric and measurements and tailoring. We left small piles of dried henna on the shop floors, peeling the old colour, looking at the orange ink designs and waiting for it to darken, and it has darkened now. The fabric and chiffon and hand embroidery and colours have been matched and are under construction, so we will pick up the saris (sarees) and wear them out on Saturday for our last night in town. We oooh'd and ahhh'd each other and every colour has seemed to match who we are, midnight and bright and shiny and dignified, beautiful. Dinesh today said "I do not know why it is or what but it is something in our minds maybe and we just think women in saris are just so beautiful" and I agree, and I will never be able to wear it as naturally as the women here but I am so grateful to be able to share it, to try on, to feel the weighted beads and walk just a little bit taller. 

 The view out my window looks like this now, Kathmandu now. We left Lamahi on Tuesday night and had 11 hours of bumpy roads, routine now, familiar now, and then a dinner break at 10:30 and the women in the restaurant who kept it open for us wished us all safe journey and safe journey sounds to me as buen viaje did last year and amongst my face pressed to window glass to look up at stars and lightning behind hills and the occasional snatch of river roaring below I turned safe journey over in my head and the way it has been said to us so far. 

Midnight and a half found an accident on the highway and placed it for us, so we rolled to the side of the road with nothing else to do but wait so we did, rolled and tucked and bent and curved into some kind of sleep, until van door slid shut and we moved out, using our whiteness, our tourist-ness as a reason to bypass security checks and at one point two army men jumped in and we drove them to the next stop and they hopped out and tapped our van and we drove faster and the streets were empty, just empty, and shop doors closed and guarded with roll-y metal doors and we staggered back in to the Eco hotel and now breakfasts are fruit and Nepali yogurt (literally just so delicious) and vegetables and variety and there are so many more white people around and sounds. 

This is from the day I had to say goodbye. 

Here is some of the space where I would put words if I could, if I knew how to start. 

Here are some words: 

mothers group tikkas and flowers, pressed in hand and hibiscus, smudge foreheads and touch hearts, tell them thank you, you are so inspiring, this is amazing, we will carry your stories in our hearts, thank you because if I said more I would cry and I wipes under my eyes anyway as we turned and left the large and shady mango tree and wave wave wave 

and the kids ran out and ran to us and ran with us and we played against the teachers in a game of musical chairs under the holy tree with Nepali drum beats and danced and laugh laugh laughed and dusty bare feet and chanting names and sweet honey rolls for lunch and how do I tell you thank you for your students and time and how do I tell you we are probably not, probably not coming back and how do you say that 

walk down stairs and there are my students and I cannot look back I cannot say goodbye not one more time and I do not and the jeep bumps us away and this is the last time I see these faces and spaces and land and cows and rivers and infinity bridges

and pasta for early dinner at home, heavens door, and pack the big van and go and say thank you family, take one last picture how do I say I love you like this and hug Deepa and Surita and how do I say bye but in the van and through the window I namaste one last time

one last time

and we drive and drive and our eyes leak and drive me drive. 

And somehow something somehow sometime maybe someday I know I must come back I cannot shake it I cannot stay but I will come back. is that okay

Look!

I found the little prince again. I did not think I would find him in Nepal and then when I was buying 

these pants, he appeared, and now these are my favourite pants. 

It's funny because I saw these pants/the design during our first stay in Kathmandu and I said: mark my words these are my pants, I will find them again when we return. 

And in a different location than originally found, I found them, and the little prince, and now I can't help the feeling of right time right place, and now I also can't remove the little prince's words: just because I'm gone doesn't mean I've gone away.

And now I feel the need to tell you that like the fox, like the flower, this place has tamed me. This place I have made my own and it has made me and it might just be the three week rule talking, but maybe that is not such a 'just', either. And maybe this is how I know, when I find myself thinking of laughing stars and small planets full of lessons and lamplighters and what makes a rose one rose, not a wall of roses and wells in deserts and walls and snakes and moving your chair every minute of every day to watch the sunset. 

It is Friday now, and I leave on Sunday. 

I do not know how many times more I will write here, for this. So this is maybe, not the last of the things for my 29 days in Nepal. Maybe. 

As is: safe journey. 

I will see you again. Soon.

-k

in the jungle, the mighty jungle..

...we sleep in mud walled, tin roofed rooms with beds with resident red ants and princess canopy mosquito nets

in the most humid heat or hottest humidity I've yet experienced, easily above 40 degrees, and then humidity, and it is nighttime now. 

Oh oh oh, feel that. This is Jungle Heaven (hotel) in Bardia National Park, (south)west Nepal and this is where I am, this May 25th, no wifi, thank goodness, quiet and nature and hot hot. 

But never fear, because 

life is okay, and isn't that just the truth. 

Because today I rode on the back of an elephant and we rocked with every enormous step of her enormous legs and her tail would switch when I placed my hand on her back and I ran my feet over her sides and it was tough skin and coarse hairs and soft grey and pink in folds and nothing more than this and her eyes like billiard balls of soul and a trunk like evolution remembered function and hilarity at the same time and strength plowing on and on. 

We crossed muddy swirling rivers and stomped delicately through jungle forest ground, a pathway from times before, and I have scratches on my swinging legs from where the trees told me namaste and smack smack get that ant and flick that bug and rock and rock back and forth. 

Get this: the jungle...sounds like a jungle. it is real. and alive. The bird calls and howler monkeys and the occasional branch snap from unseen wild things and even the sun sounds like the jungle. I have been placed back in the world when humankind did not exist and how this will exist long after we finish our weird and wicked journeys here. Maybe not the rhinoceroses(because screw you poachers, and the market that demands it *really mad face*)one of whose path we crossed today, but what will likely outlive us is the way the sun settled itself between bare branches of stark trees on grasslands by edges of jungles and rocky banks of drying rivers, and the leaping of the tall deer and the scurry of the smaller ones and creepy spiders dangling on shoulders and tree stumps and elephant dumps...this will be here. At least that is the kind of timelessness I believe in...or maybe I am just hoping. I am just hoping so much that we don't mess this up for every other living creature around us, whether they are massive rhinos that grunt and charge you and then think better and bundle off crashing intothe bush   (adrenaline like this is what my ancestors faced down sometime, in ancient days of caves and wild and everything the same, prey predator hunted hunter)or the human-whistle-tune-bird that echoed in the distance, or the geckos that spring across the white washed wall in front of me, or the crickets roaring up around this jungle darkness, all. 

Watch your step, humans. There is so much more to where we live than just us.

In other news: it is one week until our last night in Nepal all together. 

Whatever/wuteva don't matter I don't care nope not affected by this hahahha noooooooopppppeeeeeee  

*stares at you* 

Here is my face from yesterday, our last day in the classroom: 

And I didn't cry ... probably because we will be returning on Tuesday for lunch and a final meeting with the teachers so I have postponed all my feelings until then so lalalalalalalala can't hear you don't tell me it is time to go. 

But it is, and by the time I post this and by the time you are reading this (a different now than the now I'm living this...now) I will be even closer and maybe this makes you happy (finally this crazy girl is coming home) but maybe it makes you look at your month and say wait that crazy girl is coming home? Where did the time go.

...and I just misspelled something in that last sentence and autocorrect was all: the word you want is 'here'. And I was like, no I promise I want where...

but here is where

 the time went.

time went here. Here. 

Truth: I am still here. And will be yet. And here is where I was and here is where I am and here is where I will be. 

I want to roll my body in paint and high five the wall I am looking at and I want to scratch the surface of the earth and get it under my fingernails and run my face over the tufts of grass around the path and I want to make something to tell me that I am here. 

The locks on the doors here are strange and simple and intricate all together, and this place is jungle heaven and in Lamahi, we learned yesterday that our hotel name literally translates into 'door to heaven' or 'heaven's door' and this is something. This is maybe how I've been feeling the divine every time I am greeted by namaste here and I think heaven is on earth where you learn to create yourself and your space into a broken and changing harmony, create who you are in space and person and place and peace and pain. That's what I think, what I take in every time I breathe  deep on the rooftop and right now feeling the sweat roll over my body because the power has turned off now and my fan is no longer the nighttime percussion to the wind instruments of the insects, feel so complete(ly) the heat, and that is everything I feel, I need, knowing I am constantly on the threshold of heaven for myself. 

And maybe I overstep and maybe this sounds too self-serving but I write this as a pinprick in the sky, less, because the only air I breathe is mine for a moment and if you asked me to (let) go, I would, and this life is not mine to keep but mine to live. That is all I can do.

Here. 

-k

future imperfect

If I had words for today, I would need words for yesterday, for such a string of yesterdays that stretch back and back and back. Back so far I could not tell you when they began or who began them or if there was a beginning because these days I cannot put my finger quite on anything, not words or emotions or thoughts, no matter how I try. 

So it goes that watching the bridge disappear in a square pattern behind us today, looking through that centre to the small dark green glimpse of beyond, feels like this. 

And so it is that the word belong appeared today in conversation and so it goes that I cannot help but sink into this place of recognition for me. 

And yes I know that we still have one week left in Dang and a further five days after that still back in Kathmandu, but at some point or other I am cornered by these thoughts on leaving. And I wrote and wrote and wrote today trying to figure out my thoughts on leaving and I asked how will I leave this place? 

These three weeks of momos and spicy sauces and dirt roads and black tea milk tea and rice and eating with my hands; of shopkeepers calling out namaste and children bowing their hands to their foreheads and children holding my fingers, the thin small boy from today who played with my hands and I chattered at him in English; of sunsets in hazy continental colours and the stars and the moon rise and squat toilets on bus rides and sunburns on my shoulders; of waving hands and reluctant smiles and saris and bangles and being white and market place bags of peppers and gourds; of prayer flags, incense, a perfectly un-placed sense of divinity and reality in the everywhere, the everyday; of bumpy roads and rusty jeeps and mud huts and water pumps and luxuries like clean sheets and air conditioning and kindness; of beads of sweat become rivers become laughter and glopping cement and the tink of bricks and sore hands and dirt on skin and river currents washing away; of serene cow faces and ugly bull horns and goats and goats and chickens and colour; of light, and skies, and people. The people. Always.

And I do not know how (i will leave)on the inside and yet: 

and yet I will. 

I will go and stay and leave and go and stay and leave until one day when I will ask myself how will I leave this place and I will not be able. I will not say, "I will", and I will not leave. But this day is not today, is not yet. I do not feel anything but the words 'I will' pressed deeper than everything else...maybe they were there first. Maybe I will always need them. Maybe. 

And maybe I am just thinking too grandiose for one small candle in this infinite universe and maybe I am. But maybe I am also trying to understand the how's that have grown into my journey, followed by the "will I leave" from that question.

And this happens, it does, especially since Nicaragua, this how game, this battle of the I wills. Because for all the leaving that is approaching like the dawn in a midnight sky, I know my I will's are followed by this, one word: return. 

But this one word I cannot promise for here, for now. I can dream it, for all the possibilities created in these last weeks, but I cannot say it. (Perhaps I never can, because life doesn't listen to plans, but the certainty scale is tilted differently in this case). 

And still. I know. 12 days. You do not need to tell me Kelly look at all the time you have! Look at it. Be there for it. 

This is something I do, know how to do. This I will do. This I promise you is not an earthquake for me; this does not stop me, to look at time, to acknowledge expiration dates....but that's not right now is it? There is nothing that will expire about this (except maybe my visa, technically), not within me, not without me. I just am telling you now that I see that I will leave. Soon. And I see it. And I see it. I know it is there. I know I will leave. 

It does nothing but sit in the corner and colour by number until I am back in an airport, and even then it will move behind me quietly and maybe just curl up under my seat and even when I return (.) home? it will still just be there on the edge, the periphery, noting all the ways here is not there is not this is not that, not 'home', not how it is called, changed by name now, and then it will sink in, with clean roads, and tall houses, and no chickens, and white people, and traffic lights, in the morning that does not sound the same and whole grain bread and catching my foot tan disappearing in socks, soft carpeted floors, my fingernails clean, no need for bottled water. 

This I know, and this I see. And I raise you the bet that however these next days go, they will not falter for knowing I will leave. This is like asking: How could we ever live less knowing we will die? Is not each moment designed exclusively for now and for you? 

I will not say carpe diem but I will say I do not have realize tattooed on me for nothing. 

Real eyes, like Buddha, like sunshine, like the divine you see in the you in me. 

I am here. 

I 

am here.

And I will leave.

And this is not that, is not perfect, is not wrong, is not the end.

This is. 

-k