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