WHERE: Aberdeen, Scotland
WHEN:  February, 2016
WHY: Returning home, albeit briefly.

Looking through some old photos on my computer and feeling nostalgic, not for places necessarily, but the feelings that accompany them. 

WHERE: The Banff Centre
WHEN: March 12 - 14, 2017
WHY: Conference

It's 7 a.m. and I'm physically wired but mentally exhausted. I find reflective practices and continuous conversation with strangers draining, but these feelings subside when I look out the window or find time to myself. I'm supposed to be journaling - and I suppose that I am doing that now - but I'm distracted and disconnected.

Yesterday, I volunteered at a session on "Resilience as a Path to Transformation". As with all sessions at conferences like this, I'm more interested in the facilitation strategies than the content. Delegates were led through a guided visualization exercise that asked them to imagine themselves the way they want to perceived, and finding strength in their values and within themselves. 

I don't recognize these buildings now,
nor the faces of the people who stare dolefully out the windows.
There's no sense of belonging, here - 
just the dissociated millennial three floors up,
and the distant stare of the boy who's lost his mother.
I'm a creature of habit.
Of habitat.
And I'm here.

I feel at home anywhere, 
it's my gift.

To sink into the soft grass in a park halfway 'round the world,
and lull myself to sleep with the syncopation of a foreign language.
Your mother tongue whispers sweet nothings through my ears,
and I run my fingers through blades of grass and over vowels like velvet,
every bit aware of the sensations that arouse when words wrap so effortlessly:
there is an eroticism in familiar words spoken miles from my address.
I don't have a backstory, but I see the world through hardcovers and bookmarks;
I can balance on my tropes.

I use books like maps, to ground me in reality
                                         to locate the truth
                                         to navigate my own story.

I wake up next to strangers in the golden hour
in tangles of cotton and glass.
​I feel at home anywhere,
it's my curse.

This is not my story: there is no beginning, no middle.
I've come into the plot at the end - I'm not familiar with the characters.
I'm under the impression that this is where I ought to be, though it feels wrong.
These hands are not my hands.
These fingers curled around the arms of a stranger can't be mine.

I'm a creature of habit.
Of habitat.
Of habit.
I recognize the reflection in the windows,
but not these buildings.
This is not my story.
​This is not my story.

WHERE: Crossfield, AB
WHEN: March 1, 2017

Lately I have been looking for validation in all of the wrong places.