It Was The Most Blissful Confusion

I remember waking up feeling unsure and confused. My vision was still blurred and I struggled to focus, only to find myself in unfamiliar surroundings that I couldn't recognize at first. Looking around some more, I looked up and saw my brother's panicked face. At first I asked myself what he was even doing there. Then it eventually occurred to me I was in his apartment, that unfamiliar surrounding and soft yellow lights belonged to him. I smiled at him while trying to figure out what had just happened, trying to figure out what country I was in or how I even got there. I felt blank and utterly confused. The look of panic not fading off his face I asked "What's wrong??". He asked me how I felt and I said aside from confused, alright I guess. And then it started coming back. I remember walking in, saying I felt dizzy, and that was the last thing I remembered. I asked him what happened and he told me I had a seizure after saying I felt dizzy. I had blacked out and after a few moments went into a fit, he said he held my arms apart to stop me from hurting myself. There seemed to be no reason for it... I was totally sober, perhaps a bit tired and jet lagged but we were hardly doing anything difficult or stressful, chilling and watching The Office (he really wanted me to see the British version of it, and he was right, the American version doesn't hold a candle...). It had only been my first or second night there, hence why I woke up confused as to what country I was even in and why I was with my brother. So there I was at that point, in England, back in Cheltenham once more. After getting everything straight in my head, I started to focus more on the present moment, and realized the scared vibe wasn't fading from my brother, he told me I scared the shit out of him... Which started to scare me too. And we started talking about why it happened, given the fact that nothing like that had ever happened to me before. He said it could have been the overwhelmed feeling of being able to fully relax, without the parental judgment breathing down my neck after 2 whole months of it- from having lived alone from such a young age, the most amount of time I spent with that feeling on a daily basis was 3 weeks a year during the summer visit. I thought about it... And started to think about why I had gone there in the first place. And looking back now a year later, it's still difficult to pin point my reasoning, but I think it was necessary. When a tree is torn out from the roots, it could be re-rooted somewhere else and survive, but it will never be as strong as it was from it's original roots. I guess I was looking for my roots...

Keeping that event in mind for the rest of my stay there, that feeling that things could go so wrong so fast without me even being aware of it, I started to feel like I should do absolutely everything that I want to in the moment. And that is how I've lived since then... And granted, that philosophy has bit me in the ass a couple of times, but it's certainly left me with some stories to tell.

2 weeks of utter freedom in a different country and still with no belongings but my suitcase, sleeping on couches while having more fun than I ever did there before resulted in me skipping my flight home. Said to have become "truly English" after I apparently decided to steal pylons from a construction site and turn them into houses for frogs after a drunken night... Drinking cocktails from teapots, stealing backstage stamps to concerts, getting kicked out of pubs, telling the band at the next one they truly sucked, daring someone to take the pin off the DJ's record and doing my utmost best to get my brother and his friend to stand up off the floor outside the pub after attacking them with a pen so the security guy would leave us alone, stumbling around a park that had an uncanny resemblance to the park next to my old university in Toronto, and taking pictures of friends doing handstands on garbage cans (and falling off them), dancing in the street with strangers, staying up all night to watch the sunrise talking about art and life, taking a long walk while the town is still sleeping and the fog was clearing up, smell of morning dew in the air... Graffiti covered houses and urinals that rise from the ground in the middle of a town centre, meeting lovely people at a folk concert in a gallery in Camden- London ordering drinks from a horse stable turned into a bar, train rides accompanied by the music of Edit Piaf to visit family I lost touch with, jumping on a trampoline like I could touch the sky feeling like the beautiful children I was with and am so grateful to call my niece and nephews, visiting my old dog who had spent years watching me cry, catching up with long lost friends and drinking until the pub closed, meeting new ones and doing the exact same thing... Making decisions I am perhaps not so proud of in the long run... All this and more are what my life consisted of for that month. And it was beautiful, I felt lost, I felt free, I felt nostalgic yet not sad. I felt I had gotten rid of an old stigma I associated with that region of the world due to bad past experiences. But it had to end, I had to go back and deal with the uncertain life I had left behind in Toronto. So I didn't skip the next flight, I took it, unsure of what I was going back to. Unsure of all the things I had felt so certain of before having gone there.

So I landed back home, back in Toronto, and I sighed as the CN tower came into view... The events that happened since are for another post. And for the record I am not typing this now from Toronto. I am typing this from being back in Dubai once more... though it has now been 4 months I have been here. But we will get to that point later, how I got here again, and why I'm still here now.

To those of you who sent me messages over the past year asking me to write more posts, I'm sorry it's taken so long. It will become more frequent.

Until the next one, take care out there!

Beginning of what?

I managed to find and log into this again (thanks to a certain someone who reminded me it existed) and I've been thinking about writing about all my updates since my last post, just about a year ago, maybe a tad more. My dilemma has been on where to even begin. The simplicity I felt since my last post pretty much disappeared in the blink of an eye since I last wrote. So where to begin again? I guess the beginning would be a good place to start. Not sure the beginning of what... Perhaps the beginning of life as I know it now.

Perhaps a bit more contemplation though. Perhaps I need to grasp it all first. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

On my pillow I will contemplate in a world away from this one.
Goodnight world, hello dreams.