all of the lives

I sit under a tree in the shade on a breezy summer day in Kitsilano. I love it here in Vancouver. I listen to my favourite songs of the month on repeat and look around, watching the people living their lives. I feel at home here now, this is my home now, but this isn’t the only place I’ve sat and watched the people who share my city. This isn’t the only place I’ve known that has been home. I look down to my hands, typing away on this keyboard, beginning to show signs of aging (and lack of moisturiser). I remember the time my Dad told me about the distinct moment he remembered, that he looked down at his hands and realized how much he’d aged. I look down to mine and remember when they were silky smooth and my mum and nan used to tell me how lovely and soft my skin was. There’s a version of me in the future who is laughing at me right now, worrying about the inevitable wrinkles that come in the rolling of time. But there’s a version of me I did know, a younger one. Another life I lived, where my skin was softer, smoother, naive.

I think about my different lives when I walk the 10 minute distance home from the supermarket, arms throbbing from the weight of my groceries but a determined mind to just get the hell home. I used to have to do this in London too, with the same battle of body vs mind. I think about the lives I lived where I used to drive to the supermarket and had the ability to skip this almost torturous activity of carting my groceries home on my body. I think about my hometown where it would take me 2 minutes to get there and 2 minutes to get home with the only action required from me to get my food home being to alternate pushing my foot between the pedal or the break of my Nissan Micra. I think about the drive home along the Belmont foreshore and I think about the destination, my family home. I think about who’s inside when I walk in with my bags and what they’re doing. I can smell it. I can feel it. I can hear my Dad’s radio playing in the distance, no clarity to the words, just a constant mumbling that indicates where in the house he is. I think about how if I were there right now, I’d go into my mum who’d be doing work on her computer and cuddle her from behind, before she had the option of knowing I was even there. I know she’d stop whatever she was doing and turn around to hug me back. I think about what that hug would feel like. I feel it. I come back to my conscious mind and realize I’m at the door to my apartment, I walk in, put the heavy bags down and start to unpack the 7 items that cost me a whole day of work. All of the lives are within me.

I think about my morning routine, awaking at 6:30 without an alarm. My body clock works with me, we have a mutual understanding of our needs. I reach over to my bedside table and find the round remote that opens my blinds. Theres about 20 different buttons, I feel around and press the correct one to open them, even in the dark. I’ve done this plenty of times. The light peaks in slowly as my bedroom begins to reveal itself again. I step my feet into my sheepskin slippers that know my feet well and wrap my soft white dressing gown around me to adventure to the kitchen for my first need of the day, caffeine. The blinds reach the top and there she is. Manhattan at sunrise. I stop to appreciate it. You must always make time to appreciate a view, even if for just one minute. I come back to my conscious mind and remind myself of where I am. Nowhere near a Manhattan apartment physically, or financially, but under this tree at the beach. That’s just one of the lives I’ll never get to live. Like the life I spent living in a hostel in Amsterdam for 6 months. Smoking weed and cycling the canals daily. Laughing about drama from the hostel with friends I made while here. My favourite restaurant would sell cheap tacos after 9pm and we’d often make our way there after a night out and that would be enough, because in your early 20s, friendship, alcohol and making memories seems to fill you more than it does in your late 20s. I’ll never know what it feels like to physically live that life, but I can imagine how magical it would have been if I had of done things differently. If I’d cut my time in London short or if I actually went to university and used it to obtain an American visa. If I met a rich man in Italy who fell wildly in love with me and took me around the world with him. All of the lives are within me.

I think about all the other lives I have physically lived, places that have been my home and I think about how right now in this moment, they are somewhere out there, however many thousands of kilometres away. They still exist. Those lives are still alive without my presence. That hurts. That all of the lives I have lived are still living. And I want to be there in them, basking in all the goodness they have, merging my memories of them with the physical thing. But if I were there, I’d be sat under another tree, writing about how I wish I was in this life I’m in right now. Sat by the ocean, staring at the green mountains that were covered in snow just one month ago. All of the lives are within me.

I walk my feet through the sand at the beach on a hot summers day in Vancouver and I reach into my empty pocket for comfort. Something pokes at my finger and I reach around to pull out whatever it is. A small silver star. I take a few seconds to wonder how it got there and I think back to the last time I would have worn these shorts, that last time the weather was warm like this. I was in Australia, working in a childcare centre five minutes from my home. We used to dig in the sandpits to try and find these ‘little treasures'. I come back to my conscious mind and am nowhere near a sandpit filled with children who see me everyday, children who enjoyed my company, children who I miss. I think about how I used to sit in the sandpit with them and talk about how I was going on a big aeroplane to a country called Canada. I’d show them photos. They didn’t understand but I did. I come back again, look up at the mountains around me, the different sand between my feet and wonder was there even any time between that moment and this one? All of the lives are within me.

I think about the different songs I love. The songs that have gotten me through different chapters, different lives. How when I listen to them, I’m taken back to not the place physically but the feeling of how it felt to live in that time. How it felt to live that life. The experience of physically feeling a different version of time while you stand in the time you actually exist in. Evidence of the lives I’ve lived. Reminders. I look to my palms and know that time has passed and these hands have existed in lots of different lives. They’ve hugged lots of different people. Some people who I can still hug now, some I no longer want to hug, some that I will never get the chance to again. They’ve washed dishes in random hostel rooms around Europe, booked flights, held on with all dear life to a rope while I get swung around the water on the back of a boat, cooked meals from scratch for the people I love. There is life. Evidence of life. And I think about my dad, dreading the vision of the skin on the back of his hands, wondering when it all changed. And I look at my hands, beginning to take the same process. And this aging skin is evidence of the lives I have got to live. The lives I not only experienced inside my mind, but felt, the lives that have been mine. All of the lives are within me.

I think about how some nights I have no choice but to feel the throbbing in my core as I burst into tears thinking about how sometimes life does it’s thing and sometimes that hurts and I think about how maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much if there was someone next to me, to hold me while I felt that. To not take it away, but to be with me as I got through it. And I think about how liberated I feel to make plans for myself, with no-one else to think about and how I don’t know how I would ever be able to make room for another person in my life, let alone my bed. How the idea of being held on a lonely night is nicer than the reality of working at a long term relationship with someone to get to that point of safety with each other. I battle with my mind daily on which life I’d prefer. The one where I can close my eyes in the middle of the dance floor and think of no-one and nothing but what it is i’m going to get for dinner on the way home. Where I lay diagonally in my bed nightly and always have leftovers after cooking because its impossible to cook a decent meal for one person. The one where tomorrow is mine to decide and mine only. The life where I can live like this, move around the world, living temporary lives until I seek a new one. I love this life. But I do think about what the other way would have looked like. If I’d fallen in love in high school and had 3 kids and a house by now. Or if someone had come along just a few years back, who would I be right now if I wasn’t this person? If I had of walked part of it in the hand of someone else. If I got to feel those stories, not just hear about them. I continue to collect cuddles within the arms of all of the people I love. All of the lives are within me.

I think about all of the lives, the ones I’ve lived physically and the ones I’ve lived only in my imagination. I wonder which life would have been my favourite. I hope it’s this one and I hope as the years roll and the wrinkles continue to dig their way through my aging skin, that I will always see it as signs of all the lives I did get to live.

All of the lives.

If you read my blogs and enjoy them, please do reach out and send your love, it is always appreciated. - Holly