little mountains

Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to climb up a mountain covered in gravel, wearing flip-flops and carrying boulders in both hands.

Or just trying to pass a driving test.

It's the same thing, really.

I mean, people pass their driving tests all the time. They obviously also climb mountains covered in gravel all the time.

Or maybe I just have an inherent flaw that causes me to be unable to pass my class 5 driving test. But this pattern of thinking breeds the kind of self-worthlessness I'm trying to avoid in my general life. So I'll write about it instead, something that I'm good at. Obviously being a bus driver is not my calling.

{shout out to the friendly dude who failed me by the way, you were pretty cool.}

The thing about battling anxiety and depression, is that when something normal like failing a driving test happens, my body's response is to panic, shut down, and assume the world will promptly end and everyone I love will decide I am no longer a worthy human being and therefore not worthy of their love.

This, of course, is one hundred percent incorrect. My best friend, in response to my self-destructive tendencies in situations like this, put those thoughts out of my mind with a simple phrase.

'This does not define you.'

I am not a girl who failed her full license for the second time, I am a writer, an artist, a dancer, a good human, I go to the fucking University of British Columbia for sociology and creative writing, and I love autumn.

I just can't rent a car-to-go or drive the kids I nanny to hockey. I just have to stick a little green sign on the back of my car.

So I will leave you with this today. They are not my words, they are his, but I will impart them to you because wisdom deserves to be shared.

This does not define you.

Whatever 'this' is. I am not alone in my struggle to climb a mountain covered in gravel wearing flip-flops and carrying a boulder in each hand.

Your mountain does not define you.

You are so much more than this.

University Day One: head colds, new friends, and excellent professors

Well, here I am. Sipping lemon ginger tea with honey and basking in the afternoon sunshine to soothe my aching bones. To be clear, university isn't the thing that is making my bones ache, but a vicious head cold I've been fighting for weeks. University, rather, is making my mind soar and my identity take on a fluid state that all at once terrifies and excites me to extremes.

I've seen friends altered incredibly by this mysterious place of higher learning, but I never fully internalized what it would mean for me. That I would forget myself and everything that once used to occupy my mind completely. How I would develop like a darkroom photographic print, cutting off vestigial parts of me to let new limbs grow.

The first thing I noticed about university was that everyone (mostly) is in the same position. I arrived early and anxious to my Gender, Race, Sexuality, Social Justice 101 class to find fifty-ish people crowded around the classroom door, nervously clutching notebooks and oversized textbooks to their class. It was liberating and calming to realize that everyone was just wishing the person next to them would take out their earbuds and say hey.

The second thing I realized was that professors aren't scary, disconnected monsters. Rather, they are human beings just as I am, who sat in my same position, in a 100-level course, feeling the same overwhelming emotions as I was.

So, before I get too philosophical or idyllic, I will leave you with this. I have never been so excited to learn in my whole life. I have never loved terror so much, akin to the sensation of traveling without a plan. I have only my hopes and expectations, assumptions and changing self, as I write this. 

I have high, high hopes for you, UBC.

Love always,

Coral

Transitions: or crises, coffee, and contemplation

I'm starting school tomorrow.

I went shopping for school supplies today, and came out with some notebooks, a couple binders, a pencil case, some pens, pencils, and highlighters. I had completely forgotten how to back to school shop. I realized I didn't even have a backpack big enough to hold said binders.

I've been missing Paris lately. It's strange, how something can become one's whole life, an integral part of one's identity, the first thing one has in their back pocket to separate themselves from their surroundings, so quickly. And so reversibly. I cultivated a life in Paris, and met my soul mates between sips of good red wine and a river lit up by irreplaceable lights. I became a mother to a child I would miss like a daughter, and I hung the city's map on my wall so I would be able to memorize the nuances of every bend in the metro system and every monument in each arrondissement.

And then it all dissipated. And I was left back here, where I'd started, a completely different human being, in an environment all too familiar after being lost in foreign places for a year. I moved back in to my childhood bedroom, reunited with my best friends, visited my neighbourhood Starbucks, and got a job. I tried to attack life back home with the same fervour I'd traveled Europe with, and left little time for contemplation or reflection. But I had overgrown my tiny bedroom, and the streets I'd walked before the cobbles of Budapest and the fields of Edinburgh, and it all felt so small. 

So it crept up on me, this date which will arrive tomorrow. And I know, once this new chapter has begun - the train pulling out of the station like the one that carried me from Brussels to Bruges without a plan - I will be able to move, and grow. I will be altered again, meeting new kindred spirits and learning things that will change my views once more. Humans are not static creatures.

But for now, I sit here in bed, thinking I should probably get to sleep early, drinking tea at eleven p.m., wondering who I will meet tomorrow and wishing away this transition period of long commutes and part-time jobs and scattered friends around the world like fairy dust.

I guess I'll treat this new adventure like hopping on a plane to Germany: utterly terrified, full of useless plans, pictured scenarios, and a whole lot of hope.

Happy September First.

Love always,

Coral

Dear July: Week 3 // Beaches, Hiking, and Garage Sales

Dear July,

You know that feeling on Christmas eve or before an exam or a big trip when you're trying to fall asleep and your mind is playing loops of possibilities over and over again behind your eyes? Yeah. That's you. I just feel like there's so much about to happen, like I'm standing on the edge of a precipice looking down into the chasm. I'm a pile of potential energy at the top of my pendulum's swing and I can feel that in a matter of moments I will be crashing through August and into September with a fire under my heels.

July, I am so happy to be back home. You have brought garage sales and seawalls and treasures and the people I love so much.

Sea Tea Cafe

I find myself at a loss for words, July, because the photographs speak for themselves. Thank you for swimming in the ocean with my mum, your hot sunshine heating the waves to a bearable temperature.

Thank you for poetry slams and sipping chai tea lattes outside when it's sold out.

Thank you for an interview for a job in Dunbar followed by a sunset stroll by Kits beach. You remind me of my luckiness to live here and the sheer beauty in all that surrounds me. I promise to look up more often, July.

July, one of the things I missed the most in Paris was Lighthouse Park, for some reason. So my joy was incomparable when my mum and I finally hiked up to the lookout point with a picnic this week. 

We chased the sunset around to the next point and were rewarded with this:

July, thank you for giving me a mother who takes me out to breakfast at my favourite cafe (Cafe Deux Soleils on commercial) before my first day at work.

I am so lucky.

garage sale treasures

Thank you July. For days at Wreck Beach with my best friend, huge waves colliding into me and pulling me under. For everything. That is all I can say right now.

Love always,

Coral

Dear July: Week 2 // Coming Home

Listen to: "July" by Boy

Dear July,

On Friday I came home, after a week of seeing family and writing in Maidenhead on an old, squishy leather couch overlooking a sprawling garden, and a day exploring Tate Modern, Camden Town, and The Natural History Museum. I shoved my belongings back into my bags and headed for Gatwick at quarter to six in the morning.

I wait for a while at the wrong place to drop my bag, before finding the Air Transat counter in the basement. I see the conveyer belts displaying weights and exposing baggage truths and my heart sinks as I think of the too-heavy bags I carry. 

I get to the lady at the counter, with her starched white uniform and red hair and I tell her I'll probably have to check my hand luggage. She weighs it and my suitcase with a disapproving shake of her head and a clinical glance at the scale.

"I'll have to charge you forty-five pounds for the overweight suitcase and sixty-five pounds for the extra bag."

I tell her you accumulate a lot when you live away from home, across the world, for a year.

She doesn't seem to get it.

I spill the contents of my bags across the airport floor and push all my shoes and books into my extra bag.

The scale now displays 23.5kg.

She shakes her head again as she lets it on.

My debit card doesn't work, so I rush upstairs to change one hundred euros into sixty-five pounds and five pence. I try not to think that it's a third of my monthly wages to check a bag onto an airplane I paid nine hundred and fifty dollars to board.

The lady who takes my money tells me to have a good flight, love.

The flight is bearable, and I watch two movies, draw a fan and a storm in my six-hundred forty-two things to draw book my brother got me for Christmas seven months ago, and try to read. I write a bit too.

After customs and waiting for my two bags to be spat out onto the baggage carousel, I run to the arrivals gate.

That's where I see them: two of my favourite humans in this entire world.

He is holding a Canada flag and she is holding a "Welcome Home" balloon that betrays their whereabouts in the crowd of waiting people.

She ducks under the metal barrier to hug me and he takes the bag with my blanket rolled up on top of it.

We keep making sure each other are real.

I still don't think they're real, and I'm really here.

~

My mum is growing a vegetable garden.

Her eyes are bright with pride as she explains the different kinds of herbs and vegetables she is growing.

I watch her repot tomatoes and water their soil.

Her hands are muscular and nurturing and tiny specks of dirt cling to them as she pats the seedlings into their new homes.

~

He is the same as always. He says it feels like I never left.

We lie on the sand at English Bay and I pull him into the salt water as I laugh, buried in euphoria. He smiles at me.

I write as he naps and then I rinse the words from my skin with another dip below the surface of the undulating ocean.

Later that night, I fight jetlag with a barbecue at his house with his parents and his neighbours.

We eat pasta salad that he says needs more salt and baked beans and vegetable kebabs and blueberry pie and we drink white wine.

I try not to fall asleep.

July, thank you for giving me my people and my home back. I heard someone speak of losing their home yesterday and it made me very sad, but also extremely thankful.

Love always,

Coral