happy place

I take comfort in the idea that it is possible to have a happy place.  Somewhere you can go where you don't worry and nothing can make you upset, sad or angry. 

Maybe my happy place would be sitting in the treehouse I had when I was growing up. The tree house I threatened to move to when I was 7. I packed my bag and cycled my bike there are stayed til dinner time. At that point, the wagon wheels I packed were done and I was hungry. I moved back home after 4 hours. 

Or maybe it would be in the back garden of our Canadian home, in the summertime specifically, when we get the slip and slide out. Watching my brother and sister killing themselves laughing as they flew off the end of the slip and slide because we put it on too much of a slope.

Or maybe it's driving in the car singing along to ABBA. 

Lately, I've been craving these comforts. The places I feel safe, because I know where everything is and I know what to do. Backpacking is difficult, you don't have these. 

But even further, I don't have these comforts to even go back to. My treehouse was cut down long ago. My home in Canada is now someone else's. Oh, and I've also lost my ABBA CD somewhere along the way. 

So, right now, the closest I can get to a happy place is waking up an hour before my alarm. That feeling of having more time. Even if it isn't time in the right place, it's still more time, and I'll take it. 

life & pebbles

When I was younger, I used to believe that when someone passed away, they became a star in the sky, and they would be up there and watch over you for the rest of your life.

The first star was Sabrina, my first dog. She was a Schzauzer who my grandma got from a breeder in England. I got to pick her name and picked Sabrina after Sabrina the Teenage Witch, who had a black cat. It made sense to me because I now had a black dog.

The second star was my grandfather, who passed away when I was 9. I don't remember much about my grandfather, just that he was full of stories and had so many ghost stories -- which I loved when I was younger. Every church I go to, I light a candle for him.

-

I am in Trieste, Italy, and all I can think about is life.

If is so much life in the world (which there is) why is it that I feel alone? Why do I feel lonely?

I have two friends that I share everything with. In someways, two seems like enough, but in other ways, it doesn't.

Laying all of your thoughts on just one person feels like giving them a rock. It's this rock that is then always with them. And it doesn't even belong to them; because they have their own rocks too. But now they're also responsible for your rock.

That's why having more people to talk to is probably better, because you can just tell them snippets. You're giving them a pebble instead of a rock, and a pebble is a lot easier to handle. You can put it in your pocket and forget about it.

But finding people who want to hear about your problems, even pebble-sized ones, is actually pretty difficult.


- Iona

august

Hi everyone out there reading,

I haven't wrote in a while because life has just been so quick lately. My family and I boarded a plane on June 30th for Glasgow, Scotland. It feels like it was so long ago, because so much has happened since. This list is only a snippet of what I've been through, but more longer posts are to come! I thought I would do this month in numbers, because it's just an easier way for me to write it all down.

3 planes boarded
15 trains taken
2 times I have cried on said trains

14 hours spent on a bus to Krakow
12 hostels stayed at
100,000 (approx.) bug bites acquired

2 dresses lost along the way
30 times I ate my weight in cakes
40 posts on Instagram (mostly of the cakes)