Sunday, February 20, 2011

Sometimes You Just Have to Walk Away

I have 100 days left in this adventure of mine.

I have extremely mixed emotions on the subject.
Ah! Seigneur!  Donnez-moi la force et le courage de contempler mon coeur.
-- Charles Baudelaire
- Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage - De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût! - Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage - De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!
Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi la force et le courage - De contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût!
Firstly, I want to return.  I miss my friends and my family.  I miss having a kitchen and a bathroom of my own, and I miss the big, beautifully vast space that is Canada.

Secondly, I don't want to return.  I have made some amazing friends here and I can neither imagine leaving them -- some of them forever -- nor imagine living far away from them all.

Thirdly, I want to return.  I want to return to the way things used to be between my friends and I.  I want to be there for the joys and the sorrows.  I want to be able to chat mindlessly on summer evenings, have someone to cry with in the spring, be able to fight for what I believe is right in the winter, and return to my coffee dates for autumn.

Fourthly, I don't want to return.  Larissa and I were discussing it this weekend; on one hand, going home is like going back in time.  Your friends are all together, listening to the same music, dealing with the same problems, wearing the same clothes.  But on the other hand, it's like flying back in time and ending up in the wrong place.  Because while things are all the same for your friends, for the last year they have all walked together along a path on which you haven't been present. And they have all grown together and you have diverged.
There is nothing like returning to place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
-- Nelson Mandela
And lastly, I no longer know what is 'home'.  Am I returning home, or leaving another home?

No comments: