Florence

Florence - a city with history that stains its walls a deep sunshine colour, a colour that, after our first full day, we stopped expecting to see in the sky. Raindrops licked the cobbled streets all morning, afternoon, evening, and well into the night, the pitter patter a unique Italian lullaby. A city with talent on every street corner - the riverside statues stand casual, but bear as much weight as the masterpieces hung on gallery walls. Also on street corners – umbrellas. Overpriced, but essential. 

Umbrellas we’d be thankful for as we shuffled out of cafes, the taste of real coffee burning on our tongues. A taste that wouldn’t take long to replace, but would take a little longer to forget. Our mouths became havens for flavours we didn’t know existed: smoked mozzarella and sun-dried tomatoes and pesto as rich as God intended for it to be. We shrunk into children as we raced round markets to snatch every sample that was on offer, weaving our way through bold Italian gestures and voices layered with a native confidence that was foreign enough to become music to us, a soundtrack to a trip we’d want to put on repeat.

We ate our way through that city, finished every last crumb of pizza with the locals; sipped soup each waiter proudly announced was traditional, widened our eyes as the man with a round face and kind smile shaped the sheet of fresh pasta into spaghetti – a meal we thought we knew the taste of. We didn’t. Our stomachs smiled to match our lips.

A city with our laughter now trapped behind the bars of tower dungeons, our lit candles flickering near church altars, our bum imprints on every sofa in the centre of every museum room.

Arrivederci, Florence. Not a goodbye, but a see you very soon.

"Dying"

This is a work of fiction. 

“You would literally die,” the words slipped from their teenage lips. Girls and boys alike, seeking a metaphor to give their stories a hint of spice, even the one that’d been pushed to the back of the rack. Death – it lurks amongst the “totallys” and “likes” and “ohmygods”. Creeps up in conversations as if to mimic its reality. It couldn’t be simpler.

Except there’s nothing simple about the thick, frantic breaths I heard down the phone that Thursday. It was just after 6pm, the receiver slipping through my oil licked fingers. The timer was set, stuffed peppers in the oven – her favourite.   

“Lola, there’s a taxi coming to get you-” he sounded panicked. Dad never panicked. “I called one, it’ll be outside any minute now, go, grab all the money you can from my top office draw, that one, all of it. Anything you can find, now-”

 “Dad, what’s going on?”

“Your mother, car accident, crash. They’re doing what they can. Tell the taxi driver St. John’s Hospital, emergency room-” an ending as abrupt as his beginning; he hung up before he’d finished the fraction of his sentence. My ears had shut off anyway, my movements robotic. Money, oven, phone, money, keys, check oven, coat. Mum.  

The spice their fingers found was red hot chilli pepper. “My mum and I were watching this show yesterday, and we died it was so funny,” the remark scorching as I swallowed, forcing myself to keep it down. Words that were so unintentional they drifted over every other head, a mere pinch of salt gone unnoticed.

And as much as I’d like to convince myself that my mother did die laughing, I can’t. Not ohmygod I literally can’t. But I cannot fit the most heart-warming and heartbreaking feelings into the same sentence. They resist each other like cinnamon and mustard powder. The days of dying over comedy films are long gone. On an empty sofa, the laughs are strangled before they even reach my throat.

I would die for just another night, one more stuffed pepper dinner, a last laugh. 

2016

I washed my hair with salt shampoo and realised, when I dried it, the thin brown strands might have gained a little volume, but they weren’t beach kissed, not like the bottle promised. And I laughed because, why would they be? The beach is for beach kissed hair, the kind with the ever so subtle waves to match the flow of the evening tide, when the sandy families and PDA couples have long gone home and you are alone amongst the last remaining dog walkers. The beach has more time to kiss you that way. It is the kind that always seems to look better on the models, those that run in slow-motion with a tan that manages to stay smooth even around their ankles. It is the kind that you spit out when it sneaks its way into your mouth, the kind that refuses to follow the pattern of the wind.

It stands out.

I spent so long trying to come up with a metaphor, a way for the December beach walk to represent the months of the past year. It resisted with a bitter smirk. Because sometimes there isn’t a metaphor.

There’s no witty way to say 2015 was an A+ on a test I didn’t study for. I didn’t know how, at the time. And there’s no funny way to admit that I still don’t, and I don’t think I ever will. There’s no clever spin to wishing 2016 could excel. Hoping for it to be a year of surprises, of nights that morph into mornings and sunsets that refuse to give up their grip on the twilight sky. Praying it could be a year of things not turning out the way they’re planned, not following the blue inked bullet point list plastered to the fridge with a magnet. Because life can’t be planned. And the expectations that we continue to make, year after year, get lost in the cloud of unpredictability that lingers over all seven billion of us. And maybe what someone expected to happen to them happened to you, and your hopes are being played out in an Italian restaurant somewhere in the Eastern hemisphere, buried within the spaghetti strands. And that person will never know.

The idea for this blog post was born in an afternoon shower, the water causing shivers – goose bumps licked my skin because someone else in the house had thought it a good time to jump into the tub.

Maybe I’d have never made it to the beach that day if it wasn’t for the salt shampoo, the broken promise, the expectation unmet. 

Our time

My best friend got into Stanford University. Like always, my heart reacted first – pounded hard against my ribcage, almost as hard as all the work she’s put in to get there. But not quite. For eight months, sleep was replaced with rewrites of college essays, fitting words into limits they resisted with a bitter smirk. SAT words drifted away with the chai tea smoke as she blinked her eyes behind pink-rimmed glasses, solving equation after equation until her life became one big formula. And she found ‘x’.

“There’s no chance,” she’d say to me, listing every reason she wasn’t good enough until my eyes refused to roll back any further. “Think about it, of all the applicants...” I guess I had enough belief for the both of us.

Because their campus wouldn’t be able to pride themselves on intelligence, passion or determination without having the most intelligent, passionate and determined person I know as part of their student body, her boots making imprints on the grass, the rays of California sunlight painting a layer of gold onto her cheeks.

And while she spent her midnights studying, mine were met with numb limbs at the thought of her being across an entire ocean. At the thought of high school becoming just another memory. I can already taste the saltwater tears on my lips, those that will trickle down as we throw our caps up and float away with them, leave it all behind. All of this, every bridge we’ve built, every brick we’ve layered with our own amateur cement. Every morning of under-eye circles the size and colour of plums, every worksheet we moaned about memorising. I’d do it again tomorrow, if I could. Every person we spent so much time hating, every friendship we didn’t know we needed, every laugh characterised by aching abs and pained throats. Can we start over?

This whole college thing – it’s a giant leap for a teen. A leap into the arms of foreign buildings and crowds of unfamiliar faces. A leap into a world with too many hopes and too few expectations, or maybe it’s too few hopes and too many expectations and maybe we just never thought it would be our time. Our time to think up senior quotes and decide which bed sheets to pack. Our time to taste independence, let the flavour linger on our tongues.

Be proud, Stanford. Because that leap she’s taking, it’s for you. You don’t know how lucky you are. 

Puzzle

A quality that everyone needs. Fourteen letters.

Another day goes by and your biggest accomplishment has been filling out someone else’s crossword puzzle. Given them answers you never gave to yourself; fit feelings into boxes into which they’ll never fit, but you like to pretend, don’t you? It’s easier that way, easier to live a life in another’s shadow. And before you can blink away all that you’ve missed, the left cushion of the living room couch becomes your haven. It hugs you like you wanted to be hugged after you finished that crossword puzzle, strangles that desperate urge you have to wander, to roam. But there’s no time for that anymore. Your favourite blue ballpoint pen rests on the same corner of the coffee table; the armchair is taken, the footrest off limits. That’s the way it’s always been – the adventure you wished for is little more than the routine you’ve built for yourself. It’s a box that you’ve forced yourself to fit into. And it’s not even yours.

Self-confidence.

A pearl all should dive for. Seven letters.

I heard somewhere that the days are long but life is short. I’m not sure you’ve realised that yet. Or maybe you have, but admittance is a bullet you’ve learnt to dodge. It’ll catch up to you one of these hours that stretch before you, those in which all that stands out amongst your otherwise blurred vision are dots that beg to be joined. Black pinpricks that hold your hand, lead you forward, press a palm into your back to keep you upright. They’re hypnotic, aren’t they? Months drift by, unfinished canvases line your garage wall; illegible poems litter your bedroom floor. Once again, New Year’s Eve races by, just another hollow resolution, a life of joining the dots. The aftertaste of regret lingers on your tongue because you and I both know you wish they were yours. The worst broken promises are the ones you shatter for yourself.

Passion.

Give yourself this. Two words – one and six letters.

There’s no denying that the couch hugs you; but you’re the one who’s tied your arms behind your back. You’ve jailed your mind and chained your heart to another’s, so there might be double the pulse but I see half of the person you desired being. When your mother asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up and you answered with “a teacher”, she thought you were noble. So did you, until that Thursday morning that you were standing in front of an entire classroom of fluttering eyelashes and open mouths and you realised that, amongst all the formulas and theories, the diagrams and equations, you’d forgotten to teach them the most important lesson of all: how to be an individual. How to live in a world that rains rocks, how to walk on two feet, how to survive in a society that strives to stand in the way. And how to do it alone.

A chance.

So when you buy the newspaper next Sunday, try filling out your own crossword puzzle for a change. Join the dots of your own life. Stand in front of the mirror and meet every blemish, shake hands with every freckle and welcome every inch of skin. Colour by your own numbers before anyone steals the pencil away. Because those kids depend on you to teach them what it means to live. Show them you know how. 

The future

My friend and I went to a university fair last Wednesday,

She came back with an armful of brochures

And a mindful of dreams.

A plan for a future she would never know of

Until she got there.

We talked to admission officers,

Professionals in blazers and patent leather shoes,

Entry requirements rolling off of their tongues,

Boasting about how their schools stood out from the rest.

We read each brochure cover to cover,

Leafing through a prospectus to tell us how we’d live,

Dorms we’d make our homes,

Parties we’d firework through-

The kind of people we would turn out to be.

                   

With that, we lost the kind of people that we were

Right in that very moment,

Shuffling through high school hallways,

Back and forth,

Drowning in assignment after assignment,

Exam after exam,

Sinking deeper into shadows of a lurking future,

One that we couldn’t control.

Maybe it was this lack of control we feared,

Longed to discover,

Giving up every moment in an attempt to understand the next-

Obsessed with the mystery of tomorrow.

Our future lingered in the fine print of that university brochure-

The one part we failed to study:

You will be fine, it read. 

This generation

Welcome to this generation. Come in, take off your running shoes – you won’t need those. This is the sofa, take a seat, get as comfy as you can. You won’t be leaving for a while. Can I get you a drink? I’ll bring along some snacks. Put your feet up. Relax.

We’re a generation of homebodies, couch potatoes, those who bury themselves amongst blankets and sink into cushions. Sink into the familiarity of it all.

Aluminium packets glisten in supermarket aisles – red for crisps and blue for cookies. The discount sign screams for you to grab two of each. They end up being half the price of the pack of vegetables your eyes skimmed over.  Another win for corporate companies that put money far before health on their list of priorities.

Should you?

We live in a world where Netflix marathons are more appealing that walks in the countryside. Where a film set by the ocean is enough to prevent us from needing to visit it ourselves. Where we would rather stare at others living their lives than go out and live our own. Because a bowl of snacks beats experience, right?

It might be years before you realise. You could be eighty three sitting on a sofa that you can’t get up from, looking back on a life of sitting on a sofa that you chose not to get up from.

So get up.

Challenge yourself to do squats in the show’s ad breaks, lunges while the film plays. Better yet, turn the TV off, hide the remote and leave for long enough to forget where you left it. Let fresh air fill your lungs, free yourself from the dust of your living room, the lingering residue of artificial cheese and cocoa powder. Build a campfire just the way you saw on that reality show. Replace the ready salted crisps with vegetable crisps. Replace those with actual vegetables. Find the running shoes you threw into the basement and explore areas of your neighbourhood you didn’t know existed. It’s free. Escape the familiarity of it all.

Give this generation a name it deserves. A name, a life, that you will want to remember.