Home Sweet Home

How quickly a place can feel like a home. I’ve been thinking about that a lot these days, especially as I’ve now lived in London for nine months, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I remember, years ago, reading the book Zeitoun by Dave Eggers while lying under a mosquito net in Thailand; in it, Zeitoun speaks of his travelling past, and that he knew he’d always settle down somewhere if he either found a woman he loved or a port that he loved. While I won’t speak on the former at the moment, I can certainly speak for the latter. I love London.

It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to post something on my birthday every year; even though it doesn’t really feel like my style anymore, I thought I had better not break tradition. After all, turning 26 was pretty good. Turning 27 was even better. By the time I was 28 I was loving my late 20s. After turning 29 my year was a challenging one in many regards, but the challenges led to exactly the kind of life I want to be living: happy and fulfilled.

It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to post about Thanksgiving every year; I think it’s incredibly important to give thanks. I try to do it daily, but on a day where Canadians are actually given a day off to be thankful, I try to really evaluate all of the positives (and sometimes the negatives, I have been thankful for them, too) in my life.

There, standing on the bridge that would take me to my flat, is a young man, his arms outstretched in wanting embrace, his face delighted at the sight of me. Looking at him you would have thought we were old friends, new lovers, that we had shared laughs or drinks or at least a handshake.

I have never seen him before in my life.

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.

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.