Thoughts

There’s No Place Like Home

March 1, 2020 — 1 Comment

When I first left for South Korea, I did so with the intention of never coming back. I was going to make this foreign country home. But home is more than just four walls and a roof overhead. It is memory. It is knowing the story behind every stain in the carpet and scratch on the furniture. When I look around my apartment in Jangsu, all I see is empty space. There are no ghosts to haunt my recollections.

Apparently, I don’t do so well on my own.

One night, while watching a movie on my laptop, I actually started to cry. A few quiet tears falling down my cheeks, because I knew that if I were still in Canada that my Dad would be sitting beside me; downstairs on the couch, with my cat curled up against my side.

For me, it’s the little things that have always been the hardest.

Those day-to-day moments that you often take for granted. The sound of my Dad cheering during a Leaf’s game, my Mom’s voice yelling at me through the vents because our house is one giant Tin Can Telephone. Plopping on the couch to the tune of 90 Day Fiancé. Beating my Dad at Crib. Laughing at my mispronunciation of words.

Just being with them.

The thing I missed the most, was just being with them.

Which, if I am being honest, I had probably taken for granted while living in Canada. I thought that it would be easy, leaving them. That I would be okay seeing them twice a year, talking through the screen of my laptop. But if I have learned anything over the past ten months, it’s that there are no guarantees when it comes to time. Shit happens. And the people that you thought would always be there, can disappear. All it takes is a single moment.

And I don’t want to be over 6000miles away from home when that moment comes.

I’ve had people tell me that you have to live your life for yourself. That I shouldn’t move back to Canada just because my Grandfather has Alzheimer’s. That sometimes people get sick, and sometimes people die. That you have to keep living, doing the thing that you love.

Well, I love my family.

And I would rather be close enough to drop by for a Hockey Game with my Dad on the weekend, or drinks with my Mom after work. I would rather have a million little things. Day-to-Day nothings, than the life I have built for myself here in Korea.

I want to watch them grow old(er) in person. I want to be there.

But instead I am here. For 56 more days.

56 days that I will be counting down. My suitcase left open on the floor, waiting…

A Generation of Lost Boys

January 18, 2020 — Leave a comment

When you are born you are given a set of tools, and told you must build a house for yourself. So you imagine a castle crafted from clouds and stardust, with turrets spiralling high into the heavens. You picture stained glass windows, and golden chandeliers dripping with miniature suns and moons. Your eyes grow bright and wide with wonder, filled with possibility.

Until the world turns your gaze. Until parents start tailoring your dreams to fit their version of reality. Only Kings and Queens can live in castles, they will say, only birds and astronauts can touch the clouds, hold the moon. They will tell you, that there are limits to what you can achieve, before giving you a pre-made blueprint, drawn from everything they wanted for themselves.

They will be the architect, and expect you to lay the bricks, plaster the walls. You will build a house, but it will not be your home. Just a roof over your head. And for some, that will be enough. But for others, it will only serve as a garish reminder of everything that could have been. Of a dream, swept under the rug of reality.

But here’s the thing: it is never too late to tear it all down.

Which is to say, the expectation that you will have your life together by a certain age is wrong. You can go to sleep with one dream, and wake with another. You can choose one path, and find a different road along the way. Or you can stand still, holding a broken compass in your hand: lost and unsure.

Because life isn’t built from a blueprint.

But from the combination of today and tomorrow.

21/04/19

April 23, 2019 — Leave a comment

They say that airports have the most honest goodbyes, as if there is some degree of decorum to be found in the final farewells witnessed before the departure gate. And maybe there is. But I assure you that none was present when I watched my mother’s face collapse in on itself as whatever composure she had clung to slipped through her fingers. There is nothing worse than a mother’s tears, especially when you yourself are the cause, as I am. Ever since my move to Korea became official, I have been asked the question “why?” as in “why are you leaving us?” as if I wanted to put an entire ocean between myself and those I love, which I assure you I did not. I just needed to go, to reinvent myself away from unwanted mirrors, and see whether or not this idealized version I have myself can become the reality. I just wanted to take a risk.

But at the same time, isn’t this something I have always done?

For highschool, instead of going local, I decided to audition for a special program that, if I got in, would separate me from everyone I had ever known until then. Same with University. I had the option of choosing a school many of my peers would have gone to. But I didn’t. Instead I chose a campus in the middle of nowhere, with no familiar faces. I have often placed myself in various unknowns in an attempt to see whether I would sink or swim, as the saying goes.

So far, I have always managed to swim.

But this isn’t swimming, this is flying.

This is thirteen hours of being amongst the clouds. And I have always been afraid of heights.

So yes, I am scared shitless. And yes, I am sad. For all those who looked on me with incredibility, wondering how I could leave so much of myself behind, know that I am sad. That there are pieces of myself still in Pearson, left waiting before the Arrivals for the day I come back home. And home for me, as I have said, is with the people I love. And I miss them. I miss them so fucking much that I am willing to swear even though I know my mom might read this. I miss them so much that I have already spent my first night crying silently, hoping the people on the plane, in the hostel, would not see the tears tracing all the words I could not say down my cheeks.

Because there is so much I could not say. After all, how do you infuse a goodbye with all the longing you have for that goodbye to become hello once more? How do you translate a hug, into an I love you so powerful that it brings your heart to its knees? How do you erase miles of distance so that distance becomes meaningless, becomes a word devoid of all the miss yous, and come back soons.

I promise to come back soon.

To return with stories of my adventures tucked like postcards in my back pocket. To remember every single name and face, holding them like a mantra on my lips. I promise that this will all be worth it. In the end. I promise that I will make this year the starting point for so much more, because as scared of heights as I am.

I fear falling so much more.

La Familia

February 11, 2019 — Leave a comment

As I mentioned before, Canada has never felt like ‘home’ to me, at least not in the way it does for the majority of the population living under its flag. But that doesn’t mean that packing my bags and boarding a plane bound for a country almost seven thousand miles away is easy. I often find myself thinking about all the things I will be forced to leave behind, all the moments that I may miss, all the people I may lose to distance and that slow act of forgetting we call growing apart.

I wish I could take my family with me.

I wish that growing up I had not been so afraid for them to know me, keeping our relationship to the requisite hand full of hours spent at birthdays and holidays. I wish that I had let them in earlier, so that this parting could be said with sweeter sorrow. Instead of me wondering how many will continue to follow my adventure when my adventure stops being an adventure and simply becomes my life.

They all think this is temporary.

Or maybe, that’s what they hope?

After all no one in my family has spread their wings and flown so far before, so who’s to say that I won’t return, like a migratory bird? Although, even if I were to find myself planting roots in the soil of Korea, I would still find ways to return to Canada, to come back in time to wish them a Merry Christmas and Happy Birthday, to love them in the immediacy of the present without the blur of a stretched WiFi connection.

Because I want to know them.

I want to be someone that they can relate to, that my younger cousins can admire, that my aunts and uncles can be proud of. I don’t want to be the stranger at the dinner table that no one knows how to talk to because I’ve spent so much time building up walls with mileage points that it feels weird to be that close.

I want to be that person whose name they all say with a smile.

The one they all believed I could become, because my family has always seen in me the best and brightest, even when the best and brightest was buried under what felt at the time, to be a heavy shadow. A duvet of darkness.

But more than anything, I want to be a part of their lives.

And that is what scares me the most. That possibility that if I were to build a life for myself in Korea, that they would just drift away, leaving me to become another member of the family whose presence is best marked by scattered photographs. I don’t want to become an absence.

The empty place I leave behind I want filled with stories of my adventures, anecdotes mailed like love-notes to the people I can no longer see. I want my name to be passed around like my Grandmother’s gravy, to be a part of the conversation even if the dialogue is one sided.

I want my memory to be kept alive, until the day I can come back, take a seat, and say,

“Hey, what have I missed?”

Background

February 2, 2019 — Leave a comment

Despite having been born and raised in Canada, I have never called this country home. Home is my mother’s laugh, it is my father singing the lyrics to a song I don’t know as if his voice, off beat and out of tune, will somehow jar my memory. It is my inheritance; a large Italian nose and a penchant for classic rock and roll. I only need to look in the mirror or turn on the radio, and I am there. I am home, even when home is technically 6,583 miles away.

Which, in two months time, it will be.

See, four years ago I came to the realization that my life would not be lived here in Canada but in South Korea. A country whose history embodies what it means to be resilient, whose people have been bent but never broken, and whose culture is built on the notion that every individual is connected, as if we are all branches belonging to the same family tree. But when you are eighteen every dream is dubbed a phase, a passing fancy that no one believes will amount to anything more than an idea.

This is more than an idea.

This is reality, and it is scary and nerve-racking, and potentially a huge mistake. But if it is it will be the best one that I have ever made, because you cannot live bubble-wrapped in guarantees, and I refuse to be confined to something as mundane as a comfort zone.

This is my life…and it starts in

3

2

1