Waterfront Park has become a place of goodbyes for me this past year. It started last summer, on August 19th to be exact, when Andrea and I sat side by side on one of the benches overlooking the ocean, meticulously licking our pistachio ice cream cones. I remember soaking up the last rays of the evening sun while Andrea mused how the sea was like human emotion: calm some days, stormy and tempestuous the next; the odd day that you feel as if you’re walking on water, and then, of course, the times you feel you are sinking, drowning. August 19th was the last day that I was an active volunteer for Vancouver Coastal Health, and I drowned a bit on that day. Fast forward half a year, and I find myself back at Waterfront Park, seated on yet another bench next to another close friend who was spending the year au pairing in Europe. She tells me the wonders and grievances of truly living alone and how it’s made her grown in ways she couldn’t imagine. Coral has always been her own person, and I don’t think someone without her independence and tenacity and spirit could have done what she did. And now I find myself back at Lonsdale Quay grabbing coffee with Andrea before she leaves on her month long voyage back to her home in Germany. She seems excited and anxious, but laced with an underlying tension that I couldn’t pinpoint the source of. So many layers she will be revisiting, uncovering. I wonder what that’s like.

I don’t have another home. I don’t have another place that took up a good portion of my childhood. I was born into and raised in the same house for 19 years. It’s shaped who I am: someone who does not welcome change, who likes steadiness, routine, stability. And when you live in the same room, get snacks from the same cabinet, and struggle to open the same creaky window for 19 years, life becomes pretty routine. When I went back to visit Handsworth last month, I felt like I was journeying back in time. The teachers still looked the same, the hallways lined with that same shade of blue, the bell still making that same beeping noise. It was as if I had never left, but at the same time, it felt like a different lifetime when I attended school there. A simpler lifetime. I wonder if that’s how it feels to visit a childhood home from a faraway place, to see friends who you haven’t seen in months or even years.

University has taught me the importance of friends. A wise writer once told me that friends are “pebbles in the sand, jewels in a crown.” Friends are who you look for amongst a crowd of people. All the other strangers around them on the street, in a lecture hall, or in a coffee shop, just blend together like indistinguishable grains of sand. Friends are the ones who stand out. At Handsworth, you will, without a doubt, run into about ten different people you know before you reach the end of the hall. At UBC, you can walk down an entire block, scour the entire library and, more often than not, never come across a familiar face. Treasure your friends because they really are jewels in a crown: an irreplaceable treasure.

The days are long now. I’m sitting in my room on this cool June night as a crisp breeze tickles my skin and soul. I wonder what this summer will bring. Regrettably, I haven't written in a long time – sometimes I worry I’ll forget how. But I think, I hope, that writing isn’t really something that you can forget how to do. It's instinctive, natural. It's innate. I think we are born with the ability to think and speak and write – to harness the beautiful, catastrophic, magical power of words – for a reason.

We are gifted.

And as much as I consider myself to be an introvert, someone who likes space, privacy, and alone-time, I know that not even I can go forever without some type of connection. People are born to connect with each other. Words connect us. Hugs connect us. It is the connections that we will remember. And we can make these connections – we all have the words within us.

I am defined by these memories, these moments. I dress myself in moments as I walk out the door each morning and slip into bed each night, waiting and hoping and wishing for a moment to come back to life in my dream. We all dress ourselves in these memories, wearing them like warm, fleece sweaters that protect us from what is often the harsh reality of the present. And when it comes to myself, I really bundle up.

But there are only so many layers a person can support. We can’t go out wearing our entire closet or we’ll be bogged down and suffocate, as my mom says. I hate to think of my memories as weights – chains locking me down. My grandparents have fallen victim to this. Moving from a house into an apartment, I mourn with them as they come to the sad realization that 1500 square feet cannot pack away 82 years. So how then, do we still retain our memories yet leave room for new ones? I was once told that it’s not about forgetting The Old, but more about “being selective with what needs to be carried forward.” This friend wrote me a letter twenty minutes before twelve on New Year’s Eve, in which she replayed the events of 2013 in her mind like a “movie on fast forward.” She described how she wished things would slow down, but how the fireworks kept cracking; the ball in Times Square kept dropping. Life waits for no one.
Andrea shared a lesson from her childhood in Germany, in which her villagers had to be frugal to survive. Frugal with their money, their time, and their sentiments. And I think I need to be frugal now with the layers I keep on – with the memories I carry forward. I can say with comfort though, that Waterfront Park has become a very thick layer, one I won’t be shedding anytime soon.

It’s late June. My mom’s peonies are in full bloom, the fans have been brought down from the attic, the sprinklers are positioned in the middle of the lawn. Rays of sunlight increase their warmth, the birds outside my bedroom window begin chirping a little earlier each morning, and the flipping calendar on my door teases of a brighter time ahead. And so this season I will take a long walk along old bridges and inhale a deep breath of the sweet fragrance of sun and freedom and freshly fallen rain on the front lawn. As I prepare to grow even more, I will remove a few layers and put on something lighter in preparation for the warm weather. My memories will not chain me down as I set sail, but will be my anchor in times when I need a little reminder from where I’ve come and to where I’m headed. Every ship needs an anchor to keep them grounded, especially those voyaging on the volatile and unpredictable sea that is human emotion. But before I travel too far from port and become a distant silhouette on the horizon, I will recognize the transient nature of friendship, and will remember all the friends and layers and moments that were that the first embers to my supernova, rekindling old fires ignited by the first sparks of Summer.