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Day Two Hundred and Thirty:  Going Home

Part One:  From Sauble

I’m writing to you from my small single bed in Saubl, it’s not even nine in the morning yet and I can’t seem to stay laying down.  I left my window open all night so it’s a bit chilly but I fell asleep to the sound of the tree’s.  I’I have one last vogue to finish up before leaving but everything else is done.  Everything that I wanted to do while on this vacation is virtually done, the essential relaxation has taken place.  All that needs to happen today is planning out the next week, then back to being busy, again.jf

Part Two:  From the City

Part of the reason that I miss Europe so much, London in particular, is that I felt a measure of isolation from the rest of the world.  That’s  a silly thing to remark about a city full of every person imagineable at every corner, but it was the kind of isolation that happens in a crowd, that happens while you’re holding hands with the person you trust the most in a city you’ve never been in before.  It’s this feeling that is lost when you spend a lot of time in a simple Canadian room doing schoolwork or drinking wine or yoga, because this isolated feeling is only truly accomplished when you recognise that you’re a small little piece of a big thing, and that your life is a small little piece of a big thing, and that you could get lost there, be lost forever.

I suppose you could get lost here, but now it’s a year later, and at this point I was watching a Julia Styles movie and couldn’t breathe because I couldn’t decide if I was excited or upset about leaving, forty eight hours from this point, one year ago, I was every single thing more than excited.  Paris was bliss.  Paris, however, was a dream, especially compared to the rest of that trip, compared to the rest of my life.  Paris was a dream, anyway, and we knew that.

But I loved that trip, intensely, and today marks the anniversary of where it all began.  It’s over now.  It marks the beginning of an ended Adventure.  There and Back Again, right?  Back Again, the promise that eventually, actually very soon I will return.  There and Back Again, if only it were sooner.

So as I lay me down to sleep this evening I dream of that first night in Paris where I couldn’t sleep, and regretted coming, and AJ stayed up with me until I realised how stupid regretting a trip like this was, and haven’t regretted it since, clearly, since the moment I can I am going back.  But as I sleep I will think of those little rooms while backpacking especially, and every day spent, and how many times I laughed while travelling at myself, or how many times I’ve thought about picking up, grabbing a Greyhound to Toronto, and just peacing, not comin’ back.

Here’s to the future and the adventures only just out of reach.

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