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