coming and going.

In my time, I've spent a lot of days stranded in airport lounges. There have been times I haven't minded, and times that made me question my very cursory grip on my own sanity. Right now, somewhere outside Philadelphia, I'm leaning toward the latter. Thank goodness for free wireless.

In no particular order, and in order to keep myself somehow rational as I pass the time, here are a couple of airport stories from my past.

Pearson International, October 2004.

It was Thanksgiving Monday, and I was heading back to Vancouver after my first trip home to Ontario. I was leaving behind the love of my life, again. On the redeye flight to Toronto a few days previous, the in-flight movie was Before Sunset, a sweet little love story starring my childhood fake boyfriend Ethan Hawke, and I had spent the dreamy, dazed trip looking forward to seeing my real boyfriend again, feeling so safe and so secure. When I got to the airport, practically stoned on exhaustion, there he was, at the bottom of the escalator, wearing a suit, holding up a sign that said Miss Fralick. I melted into his arms and I cried. Getting ready to say goodbye to him a few days later, I melted into him once more and cried once more and then had a breakdown when the woman at Starbucks gave me the wrong kind of tea. My parents were there with us, and my mom whispered to me to hold myself together, but I just couldn't do it. Red-faced and heaving, I said my farewells, a pattern that would become all too familiar over the next couple of years as I continued going back and forth forever. I stumbled through security and sobbed quietly until my flight was called. The in-flight movie for the trip west was The Notebook, through which I kept right on crying, both out of anger at being so emotionally manipulated by a film and utter dejectedness regarding the state of my own romantic affairs. There was a strange relief in finally getting back to my little room at Green College that night, quiet and alone and cried out at last.

Vancouver International, April 2006.

I moved home from Vancouver in a state of complete emotional insanity. I was single and ambivalently done school and still somewhat uncertain about returning to Ontario for good. All I wanted to do was disappear, and I felt like I was going about it all wrong. I packed in fits and spurts in the middle of the night and during breaks between paper writing and beach walks. Pretty well everything was labelled "Miscellaneous"--a shoe, several books and a necklace in once box, half-burnt candles and some grad school notes in another. I mailed a lot of my stuff home in advance, but that last morning, I still had four giant suitcases and a Rubbermaid container the size of a small apartment to drag up to the airport. The sun was shining and it was one of those perfect Vancouver spring mornings when it feels more like July than April, when you feel so incredibly smug and self-satisfied about your decision to go for broke in the prettiest city in the country. My Best West Coast Friend Tara and I took one last walk together down to Kits Beach and smoked one last roach on the rocks, for luck. When we got back up to our apartment, we called a taxi, I loaded up, and said goodbye.

When I got to the airport, I was mildly buzzed and wholly out of it. I had to stand in a special lineup because of all my extra bags, and there was a dog behind me. I convinced myself I was about to be arrested, but instead, the wonderful people at WestJet cut me a deal on my extra baggage fees. Things are looking up, I thought to myself.

So I sat and sat in the departures lounge, daydreaming, till out of nowhere, a WestJet staffer ran up to me and said, "Oh, it's you!"

"Excuse me?" I replied, convinced my days of freedom were numbered. I must have done something wrong, I thought. They must have found pot in my luggage. In my head I started writing the Hamilton Spectator article about the incident: Local High Achiever Gets High on Something Else, Lets Entire Community Down.

"I recognized you from your pictures!" he cried. He looked like he had just won the lottery.

This was getting weirder and weirder. Luckily, he noticed how freaked out I was, and quickly explained: When one of my mammoth suitcases was getting loaded onto the rack, the bag tag had somehow gotten torn off. It ended up on an arrivals carousel, where apparently it just spun around and around in circles for ages, all alone (somehow fitting, I thought). This guy had finally retrieved it and brought it back up to departures, hoping to reunite it with its owner, and in an attempt to figure out who it belonged to, he opened it up. Lucky for him, it was filled, at least partially, with photo albums and yearbooks ( I am not one for travelling light).

"So I just looked through and tried to pick out some of the faces that were in most of the pictures," he said, "and hoped I'd see one of them up here." He paused, and squinted, looking at me with sudden scrutiny. "Did you dye your hair?"

Oh, I thought, this is a sign.

Bloom where you're planted.

When I first moved to Vancouver in 2004, I lived in a college for grad students on the very edge of the UBC campus. Green College sat so close to the ocean that there were spots on the grounds where you could pretty much fall down a cliff and into the cold waters of the Pacific (a possibility I tested on more than a few tipsy, stumbling nights around the property). To get home from class every day, I would cut through the Rose Garden on my walk, a shortcut that actually took longer than the straight route and involved a descent down steep stone stairs. In my memory, Vancouver is all incredible peaks and valleys--not just off in the distance, but also right in front of me, on every sidewalk I ever travelled. Each block was a strange and treacherous incline, unknown territory. Anyway, I didn't mind the extra steps through the roses. The UBC campus is teeming with horticultural secrets: waterfalls, experimental farms filled with hybrid apples, Japanese tea gardens, nude beaches. I felt lucky to have such a treasure on my daily path. As the fall wore on I watched in amazement as the roses continued to bloom. I came from a place where roses only really appeared in June, around my birthday. My daily walks through that garden made me feel like it was my birthday all autumn long, a feeling that came as a brief daily relief from the overwhelming homesickness that took up so much of my energy in those first few months on the other side of the country.

One morning in mid-December, I was walking through the rose garden under a dark grey sky. There was a cold wind blustering; that particularly Vancouvery, sleet was stinging my face. I was on my way back to my room to work on my last assignment of the semester and then to pack up my life and get ready to move out of Green College. On a tipsy, stumbling night a few weeks earlier, I'd made the decision to move off campus and into an apartment on Arbutus Street with a view of the mountains. All fall, I'd been struggling to find a place in Vancouver to put down my roots, and I nervously hoped that this move would be the right one. (As it turned out, it was, and the friend I moved in with would turn out to be one of my best friends in all of the explored universe, but I didn't know that yet.) As I schlepped my way through the roses that morning, cold and lonely and longing for home, I was feeling a little desperate.

The roses were pretty well finished, I noticed, and I felt even more bummed out than before. It was the winter of my discontent. If there's one thing I know how to do, it's send myself into a spiral of unfounded despair. I was on my way down the existential rabbit hole when I ran into a friend of mine from Green, reaching out to touch a gorgeous, newly formed, yellow rose. She'd found the last few flowers in the garden, and it was blowing her mind.

"Isn't this incredible?" she said. "December and they're finally blooming." Like me, she came from a province where the roses' time is short but sweet. We weren't used to this long, meandering season. We weren't late bloomers, or at least, we'd never admitted it to ourselves if we were. It was one of those moments that made me take a step back and realize that after all these months, all this slow growth, I was suddenly, miraculously, home. It wasn't the home I expected, nor would it be my home forever, but there it was, at once familiar and strange and unexpected.

Bloom where you're planted, someone once told me. I've bloomed in a lot of weird and wonderful places, put down roots only to rip them back up a few years later, haul them with me to the next stop on the road. I've come home a million times, in a million ways. I think we all do. I read a short story by Carol Nelson awhile ago that said something like, "Christmas is a time when you're homesick, even when you're home." That makes sense to me. We're all just trying to get back to the place that means the most to us, even though that place changes a little bit every day. Sometimes we don't even notice it changing. We don't even know we need something different, and then suddenly, there it is, right before our eyes, on our very own doorsteps.

Merry Christmas, all.

April really IS the cruellest month.

Four years ago, I was in Vancouver, re-reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and falling in love with Daniel Clowes through a beat up Eight Ball compilation I borrowed from the Hastings Library and wondering how I was going to get through the summer all alone on the lonely coast.

Three years ago, I was still in Vancouver, getting high at Kits Beach and trying really hard to finish Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. I never did get through it. I was otherwise occupied with the arduous tasks of polishing off one's stash, shipping one's belongings back across the country in the most inefficient manner possible (thanks, Canada Post. I am pretty sure you still have a pair of my Hush Puppies), and wondering what I was running away from.

Two years ago, I was in Ottawa and actually believed I might stay here. I was reading The Kite Runner and actually believed I might enjoy it. (I was also reading 26a by Diana Evans, which has since landed on my top ten dysfunctional family novels--full list forthcoming). I was pretty busy with saying I love you to the wrong people and having brunch dates that started with a friend coming over to change my locks.

One year ago, I was stranded at Dulles International Airport, reading Real Simple Magazine and discarded sections of the New York Times, willing myself not to go crazy. When I finally got home I nearly kissed the ground outside the Ottawa airport, which is a terrifying testament to my delicate state of mind. 24 hours in an airport can really change a person, man. I came back philosophical and committed to making good life choices, and then I read a bunch of self help books. Date Like A Man was not one of them, but I do intend to re-read that classic chestnut soon--its lessons, like a bottle of cheap Chardonnay, grow more dangerous with each passing year.

This year, I'm picking myself up, dusting myself off, and starting all over again. I've had a Chuck Palahniuk book sitting on my bedside table for months, as well as most of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, all on loan from someone who refuses to take them back till I get through them (proof positive that I am still saying I love you to the wrong people). I'm packing up again, but this time the move is much more organized (and in no way supported by the postal system). This part of the trip's going to be easy, I think.

I get restless in springtime. For once, this round, I can do something about my itchy feet.