Beautiful last days

This weekend has been perfect. I feel complete. I can't imagine a better way to spend my last days here. Whatever Victoria means to me, this weekend captured it. Sunshine and kitchens filled with spices and orange couches and cats on rooftops and old friends and new friends.

Saturday night I went swing dancing. Somewhere between the beautiful improvisation, strangers asking you to dance and getting jammed I remembered that maybe I want to travel to understand why I want to stay for nights like that, like I once read. Nights like those.

Today I got together with a big group of good friends to have a afternoon filled with farewells. We listened to live music, jumped in the ocean on a whim and dried our ocean-drenched-sun-drenched hair hair sitting on the beach building things out of the rocks and talking. Afterwards I biked with a friend around town getting ingredients for pesto before going over to her house and making a wonderful dinner with salad from the garden and chai tea and the sunset in her front yard.

Biked home with the sounds of fireworks in the distance with the celebrations coming to an end in the city and orange being chased by darker and darker blue in the sky.

Packing

With 10 days left before I leave Canada and head to the Netherlands for a week before flying to Mumbai, my suitcase is lying empty and open against the wall facing my window.

My room looks like every thing got caught in a storm and settled somewhere between chaos and serenity and my nights are occupied with drawing after childhood drawing being put neatly into small boxes and dropped in a corner, wondering how long my hair will be when I open them again because those dreams of fairies and straw rooftops are put away too. Of that little girl that liked the colours blue and yellow and running and running to catch a distant maturity she thought she always wanted. And now I'm here.

Of not being able to land on a balancing point. Am I sad? Am I excited? Am I scared? Maybe. It's unreal, so I'm stuck here feeling like everything is normal. Well, things might be normal. But I have the constant feeling that I should be crying, or jumping but I'm running over my moss covered backyard and sinking my fingers into the soil and wanting to sleep for a while.

I am ready. I am so ready. But sometimes I wish I had more time to appreciate everything I've understood these last few weeks. How to sum up the last 16 years of my life in a suitcase.

The view from your tent

I have been cooped up in little Victoria for a while now, living in my room and busy with all sorts of things that range from seeing friends for the last time and packing up my room into boxes. All of this is extremely exciting but also scary ... and I'm left wishing I was on a mountain somewhere, or on a beach. 

I found a website today called The View From The Tent Door where people submit their stunning pictures of them camping. 

Some favourites:

 

I am hoping all the more that I can go to the Himalayas in October for Project Week! I miss this. 

I can't believe I have the chance to go hiking in the Himalayas for a school project. UWC, I LOVE YOU. 

Summer on the island

Flowers in the garden on Denman Island at the cottage

Active Pass, a beautiful lighthouse from the ferry

My little bike

Elijah dropping pretzels on me on the ferry

Canada Day downtown

Summer is here!

I have been talking to more and more of my co-years, and they are all equally wonderful. I could write pages about the small glimpses I have of them and how I cannot wait to live with them. All of them.

I got my vaccinations today!

Not many big words coming to mind right now, this is a simple post. Which is nice.

With school behind me, and this being the official first day of 'freedom' I am struck by how fast time goes. Two weeks ago, I dreamed about this moment, this day. Of nothing and anything, of liberty. Summer has never come so unexpectedly. Before I knew it, I had to clean out my locker, clean out that little part of ESQ that held a bit of me, a bit of my broken pencils and scrap paper and old tea mug and discarded jackets. A locker that witnessed all the hasty conversations between TA neighbours and quick study sessions before school. All the tutoring, eating, leaning, laughing, walking that happened in front of that locker, and now it's closed and empty and ready to hold a new person's memories.

So this is it, then? I'm officially in limbo. In that scary but blissful place where I choose my own deadlines and  I don't have a different place associated with my days. Just home. Between Victoria and Paud.

To keep me busy and give me some purpose, I will be in an experimental and interactive theater production based on the book 'Unsettling the settler within.', which hopes to put the relationships between the Canadian Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in a new light. I will also be a youth delegate at an environmental education conference happening at the University of Victoria, which I am extremely excited for. This weekend I will be driving a car filled with friends, guitars, recording equipment and camping stuff to a nearby island to volunteer and hang out for a weekend at the Campbell Bay Music Festival and record some songs with my little band!

I'm confused but excited and calm but freaking out. I don't understand how to wrap my head around any of this and I wish I could. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

I will miss Gary oaks. and arbutus' and baby raccoon. I saw baby raccoon today, they were unbelievably cute.

I'm happy.