dear japan, i love you

adventures

Hung over. Hung up. Hanging on.

However you want to word it, I have been all of the above for the past six months (!!!).

The first may still ring true when I board that plane tomorrow, but the rest will soon be history.

Japan, get ready for me cause I'm coming!

two years ago

It may have been almost six months (how?) since you two parted, and almost six months since you've seen his face, and over six months since you touched his face and smelt his smell and fell asleep to "criss cross apple sauce" shivers running up your spine, and probably over a year since you two were actually happy, but still, you can't help but feel strange tonight when you hear through a friend that he asked another girl out. And it doesn't matter what the outcome was, and even though you moved on and moved off of that, too, long before he asked this girl out, you still feel so strange and a little bit sad and mostly confused.

you blew fire in my heart when i was frowned

April may be the cruelest month, but May has always been my favourite. Although it falls mid-year, to me, May has always been synonymous with fresh starts. It's the first month that feels like spring always. It's during May that one day, while walking home late at night, you realize for the first time how the city, your city, has finally and fully awakened. You are greeted with streets shaded by the greenest leaves and the prettiest blossoms. It's a sight that is familiar and new all at once, for even though you've seen the city in this perfect state for the past twenty-two years, you always seem to forget it after months spent hibernating. May was also always a return home after a school year spent away. It was expectance and anticipation. And even though circumstances have forced me to hibernate from the month so far, May remains lightness and hope.

bury teeth in the roots that keep holding you down

nineteen

It's not just a carton of chocolate milk that's making me smile in spite of the rain! My horoscope today told me "An extremely constructive outcome is on the way" and right about now, that sounds real good. Oh. And did I mention I'm going to JAPAN in nineteen days? YEAH. So bring on the rain, and I will shake my fist in its face and smile harder than I ever have before.

love actually

I want to dance dance dance across the ocean and I want my dress to swirl romantically around my legs and I want my eyes to squint in the sunlight and I want to stop holding my breath when the doorbell rings and wishinghoping that he's out there, waiting, holding signs confessing his always forever love.

ghosts

let's speak of the past in the future perfect tense

There are times, like today, when the past comes and slaps you across the face and laughs "you aren't done with me yet," and so you are shaken by a sighting of purple and one mustache and a form you can't even recognize anymore, and even though it's the first day of May, and the sun is back, and you are going to see your wombmate in a mere twenty days, and you are finally going to get a stamp in your passport, you are shaken.

london girl

Because I'm so good with dates, I know that I said goodbye to London for real and for good a year ago yesterday. I remember the way my room looked after all my possessions had been wrapped in newspaper and placed into boxes upon boxes and even more boxes. So empty and blank, I wondered how I'd spent the past eight months within those walls and I asked myself where those eight months had gone and what I had to show for them.

But, as unattached as I'd been to that always somewhat barren room, unattached was I not to that city I'd spent the past four years in. This connection grew slowly, and was hesitant always, but it was there nonetheless. I still remember the tears that fell as we drove that familiar path to the highway "one last time." I was trite and stared out the window, not saying anything to the boy sitting beside me, wanting to remember the way the city looked in the middle of spring. I thought I could freeze frame those trees and the sunshine two hours west and the way the sun bounced off those trees just so. It was at that moment, as the tears fell and as the boy said "It's okay to cry", that I finally realized how much of my life was woven within those streets and those trees and reflected in that southwestern Ontario sun.

Now, a year later, I find myself welcoming spring in a city two hours east. A city that I knew would always be home during those four years spent away. And though Toronto has always been that home waiting for me to return, I can still close my eyes when I wake to an early morning breeze and I can still for a moment imagine I'm back there, back where the air was always cleaner and back where the trees were forever taller and where the morning noise outside my window was always quieter and slower and where the boys were always sweeter. In the morning, or very late at night, I can pretend I'm still mostly wide-eyed and fresh and hopeful and excited about everything and romantic and a believer in love and affected. All my growing up is attached to that one forest city, and now, here, in a city I couldn't wait to return to, I'm simply grown.