By Marija Kanavin

" ... but part of you is screaming don't you understand how much I have changed? And I don't mean hair, weight, dress or anything else that has to do with appearance. I mean what's going on inside of your head. The way your dreams have changed, the way you perceive people differently, the habits you've you lost, the new things that are important to you."

Months have gone by and I don`t know how to pick up the words where they scattered like my thoughts and tears on grad night, falling like a trail of bread crumbs so I can find my way back there, soon. I left MUWCI a million years ago. The dirt under my nails and the glow of fairy lights in my hair slowly washed away with each pacific wave that crashed onto what felt like a unfamiliar roof and sticky notes and pieces of grass and scratches around my ankles that stowaway-ed in my suitcase seem like the only reminders that it wasn't all a dream. And I still don't know what to say, where to begin.

Answering 'it was good' isn't enough, and yet those four letters hold everything. Claiming polite conversation, the g holds all the nights I had to leave Sams roof because of mosquitoes and peeling mangoes in Paud and the o sings like my ukulele by the lake on that last Wednesday and continues to o: burn the roof of your mouth like maggi just off the stove, reminding you for days that it was worth the 2 am d of May thunderstorms excusing you from studying just for a moment because you need to be reminded of what rain feels like. It was good.

It's taking me a day to write a paragraph, but I know it will take years to understand what they mean. I don't know how I've changed or what I've learned or what was the best or the worst or the funniest or the most meaningful. It just was, often and loudly and sometimes quietly, too, and I am grateful for it and it doesn't have to make sense and it's enough.

Norway in 2 days, India in 10.

Promise to write more this year.