The Yaletown coffee shop is crowded on this Sunday afternoon. People are laughing happily. The coffee grinder is buzzing, the steamer hissing and the blender spinning loudly. Music comes and goes along with the rhythm of conversations.
Sitting next to me, my friend Gaby is silently typing on her Mac, a look of intense concentration on her face. She’s writing travel reports for a German online magazine, but I suspect her mind is elsewhere, trying to figure out a career, a long distance relationship, a next move. I glance at her screen and pick up a few contrasting places: Canada Place, India. She’s traveled a lot and her awareness has shifted as it is always the case when one opens up the Pandora box of our world. Never completely home again, forever on the move.
My mind is far away, too. Staring blankly at the javascript on my laptop screen, I’m drifting slowly eastwards, until land is behind me and the ocean in front, until the sun rises over nothing but water and until I can see and touch the unexpected. It’s a pleasant drift, smooth and warm and calm. For a moment, the line between reality and fiction blurs, then it becomes a door, and then a simple game of fate. Everything is possible, I remind myself, as long as we believe it could be. The question mark is really what makes life bearable; asking what if keeps us alive and on our toes. It makes our imagination work overtime and at times transforms dreams and theories into possibilities, and possibilities into probabilities.
I look up and wonder if anybody around me is consciously crafting their life, if anybody is even interested in doing so, if they would – or do – find it exciting. I’m enjoying this moment. It feels like many different roads are stretching before me to the horizon, some crazy and tortured, others straight and wide; some beautiful and complicated, others boringly simple and safe. I don’t really want to know which one I’ll chose tomorrow, or the next day. I just want for them to be there a little longer, tempting, teasing, calling me.
I feel like a kid thinking about the ice cream shop on the way back home. Not knowing for sure if mom will buy him one, but thinking about it so hard he can almost taste it and it acquires a life of its own. Forrest Gump was wrong; life is more like ice cream, flavored with chocolate dip and surprise bits. It’s sweet, it’s cold and it melts away fast if you don’t pay attention. Oh, and kids enjoy it so much more than adults because they are unaware of the chocolate dripping all around their mouth.
I’ll have an orange* sherbet please.
2014 note: The orange color refers to Marie’s old MySpace account theme, and was one of her favorite colors… History was being written.
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Marie
Vancouver Island Daryl