Brenna Holeman

12 years ago, I was getting ready to start another day at high school; it was my first week of being in Grade 12, my first week as a prefect. It was picture day, so I had woken up early to spend a bit more time on my hair and makeup, make sure my shirt and blazer were ironed properly. I was in the kitchen when my dad called from work.

“Something happened in New York, ” he said. My mum and brother were there, too, so the three of us huddled around the TV and watched with horror as the towers burned. My hometown is an hour behind New York, and so we had been sitting there, eating cereal, chatting about the upcoming day, without knowing what had happened, without knowing that the world was falling apart.

My ears perked up. “Winnipeg”, I had heard the girl say, I was sure of it. I had a fleeting sensation of excitement, of hearing the name of my hometown dropped casually into conversation, and I briefly wondered why she was mentioning it at all. This entire process took about 1.5 seconds in my brain, before I once again stopped myself, rolled my eyes.

“I’m in Winnipeg, you idiot,” I thought to myself. I had been for a month.

I went to Burning Man in 2011, and stayed the full eight days. I camped in the desert under the big clear sky, my days spent riding the playa on my bicycle, making friends, cooking grilled cheese sandwiches, my nights a hazy blur of stilt-walkers, fire-breathers, mutant cars shaped like scorpions and jellyfish. I wore outfits I threw together from a garbage bag of costumes in the trunk; I wore saris and glitter, fake fur and angel wings, tutus and sometimes nothing at all. When I first reached the gates on that very first day, a girl wearing pink fishnets made me roll around in the playa, coating my hair in the greyish dust. “Welcome home,” she told me, and hugged me. I was instantly in love with this alternate universe, this utopian dream of creativity and art and acceptance.

There’s been a foreboding sense to this summer – I’ve known all along that, eventually, I’d be packing up and moving my life to London for an indefinite period of time. This isn’t a surprise; I’ve been talking about it since spring. And yet I’m the type of person who, instead of taking my time packing and organizing and planning, will leave everything until the very end. I leave in four days, and yet I still feel as though there’s a lot to do. That’s the way it always goes, though, isn’t it? There’s a lot to do and we stress out and then it’s just done.

“I can stitch up your chin if you want,” the young woman told me as she pressed yet another alcohol-soaked cloth onto my bleeding face. A monkey peered at me from the window. I could hear the cries of exotic birds. My clothes were still covered in mud, and everything hurt.

“Have you…” I struggled to find the right words; I didn’t want to offend her or seem impolite. “Have you ever stitched a human face before?”

For this instalment of the Around the World series, I chose something that is very near and dear to me: coffee. Surprisingly, I only started drinking coffee after university; I’d have the odd cappuccino or two, but it was only when I started spending more time in Europe that it became normal to duck into a coffee shop and grab something, or to enjoy an hour spent with a latte and a book. Now it’s unusual if I go a day without drinking some form of coffee – my favourite is a good espresso or americano.