one year in canada
a hundred little lives
Yesterday marked one year of being in Canada. A whole year since I left my home in Australia and landed on the west coast of BC with two suitcases, a backpack, and a vague idea of a dot on a map of an island I was headed for.
Milestones like this—the passing of time in general—often feel strange to me. Slightly off-kilter; almost liminal. Friends’ reactions have largely been: A year? Already? As though it wasn’t so long ago that we were belly-laughing over a mug of cacao in the garden or walking up the beach after a cold ocean dip, dripping in salt and delight.
It’s like the gaps left by my absence were soon filled with other connections, other moments. Their worlds moved forward, full steam ahead, calendars brimming with work and play and family and friends, and I guess time moves differently when its cadence is familiar and the weeks gently roll into each other—or when something as reality-shifting as new parenthood bends time into something else entirely. Honestly, what is a year even meant to feel like?
When I look back at the person I was 366 days ago, she feels like a whole other life. I feel like I’ve passed through so many since—months spent in one reality, weeks in another—trying on skins and shedding them again like they were always borrowed for play, not meant for keeps. At some point, the pelt starts to snag in places where it’s grown tight and heavy, and I itch to shrug it off. To step out of it, nose lifted to the air, catch the scent of what’s next, and pad towards it into the dusk. Lighter. Maybe a little wiser. Still me, but… shifted. I don’t really know how else to describe it.
At the same time, there are moments from my final months in Australia that still feel like yesterday. Flashbacks hit like shotgun slugs, punching so deep and visceral I can taste them like blood on my tongue. It feels like time collapsing on itself. Like I’m not fully here but not fully there, either. Like I don’t know what now means and sometimes I just want to stay then a little longer and instead I’m everywhere and nowhere, feeling it all at once.
In full disclosure, I don’t have a tidy thesis for you or a real point to put forward. I don’t know if the time passed feels like a year or less or more or fast or slow. All it feels like is… a series of moments.
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I’m alone in a dark basement room in North Vancouver with a small bed and a bedside table, my open suitcases on the floor, scrolling through car sale listings until my eyes water, jet-lagged and heartbroken.
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I’m in a blue timber cottage in Ucluelet bordered by tall cedars and firs, brewing cacao in the early morning. I open the front door and step out onto wet gravel that’s cold and sharp underfoot. An eagle calls through the mist. I walk the path to my rock in the garden, moving slowly, watching deer chew on tall sweetgrass soaked in dew. I perch on my rock and shiver a little, breathe in salt and brine. Swallow a mouthful of warm, spiced chocolate and press play on voice notes sent from Australia through the night. I close my eyes to better feel their voices, their love, wrapping around me. It starts to rain, and I sit there still.
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I’m going for a surfing lesson in frigid water with a group of women I just met, encouraged by their kindness. I’m wearing a borrowed wetsuit so thick I struggled to pull it on, carrying a borrowed board. The first wave feels like a wall of ice and I mutter a thank you to my borrowed booties and hood. The sun is setting over Incinerator Rock and the waves are small and kind. A group of dorsal fins breaks the surface up ahead and we start to bail out of there, unsure if its orcas or sharks. Then, we’re paddling back out again to see the pod of pilot whales and I’m laughing at how ridiculous it is that I’m here right now.
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I’m waking up in a tent surrounded by snow, sardined in there with two friends. We’re wearing every layer we brought and still cold at this altitude. When we step out of the trees, the sky is a perfect blue, the rising sun cresting the mountain ridge ahead. Everything is crisp and clear and silent, Garibaldi Lake a glassy mirror edged in ice. I sit on a log, spooning steaming oatmeal from a plastic bowl, and watch a chipmunk scavenge crumbs as the sun climbs higher. I tip my head back, soaking in the warmth and light. Then I’m stripping naked with my friend—nervous giggles in the chill—and I dive into the lake. Emerge whooping, lungs heaving, breath punched out in gasps. Fucking alive.
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I’m sneaking into a cliffside resort with my housemate. It’s late at night and we’re slipping through the gate, making for the hot tub. It’s a full moon, everything dipped in silver, a big swell crashing against the rocks. We undress, eager for the heat, when an outdoor light flips on behind us and we turn to see a group of hotel guests mid-soirée through the big glass windows. We hit the deck, crouching along the ground below the rise of the low wall that now blocks us from view. We hold back snorts of laughter as we manoeuvre the hot tub cover off like naked gollum creatures, tits out and legs splayed, the epitome of elegance. We slip in and sit and soak, talking quietly over the hiss of steam and jets, not quite believing the insanity of the past month. A reset.
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I’m walking to the secret cove by my house, pillow under an arm, giddy that the sun is finally out. I climb down the escarpment to the shoreline, leaping between the craggy rocks and noting the tidelines of kelp and debris, the crabs that scurry past. I turn towards the first beach I need to cross and see someone there over the bay, a little higher up, waving their arms in my direction and pointing. There. A black bear. Casually flipping rocks and waddling up the sand. I sit where I am and watch and wait until he’s shuffled back into the thickets and I chance the crossing. Two friends join me later. We lie there journalling and eating strawberries and venting, laughing with each other, and for a moment, it actually feels like summer.
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I’m punching Highway 4 across the island in my van, overtaking tourists, blasting tunes, singing, beaming, laughing. I know the bends and I love the rush of them, love the wind pouring through the windows, spinning the hawk feather tied to my rearview mirror. I love the freedom of the long stretches of wilderness flying past. Then I think of how wide he would’ve grinned to see me driving like this, and it sucker punches me. Now I’m crying on Highway 4.
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I’m on Salt Spring Island with a friend and it feels like we’re on a different continent. We find goats to pat, wander through the markets, eat nectar-filled figs from roadside stands. We’re out on a boat, coasting through the gulf, watching a whale breach at sunset, the sun a dusty, fire-glow orange, hair whipping back in the wind, drunk on life.
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I’m wiping down the bar I work at, closing up. It’s past midnight and the streets are empty and quiet. It’s just me. I hear the foghorn and pull my flannel shirt in tighter as I walk to my van, keys in hand—calm, but still scanning the area like any woman walking alone at night. Movement catches my eye, and I turn towards it. Something slinks past the glow of a streetlamp, then disappears into the dark. A wolf. My first wolf.
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I’m road-tripping Vancouver Island with my sister—two weeks of bliss and adventure. Cooking dinners perched on rocks and logs, skinny dipping in rivers, rewatching Euphoria cuddled up in the van at night. We’re wandering the sea stacks at San Josef bay at sundown, snacking on handfuls of huckleberries we pull from bushes as we hike. We walk over wolf tracks and set up a tent on a beach at the northern tip of the island, surrounded by driftwood. It’s freezing so we make tea and sit quietly as a bear wanders by. Then it’s my birthday. We slip down onto a private beach in Strathcona State Park before dawn. I’m brewing us cacao, and she must have managed to buy sparklers at Walmart without me noticing because she pulls one out and lights it. She hands it to me and we stand barefoot in the pastel morning watching sparks dance, quietly celebrating. We drop our clothes and swim out to the floating platform, hugging each other, watching the sun come up. Then we catch a ferry and spend three days splayed out naked like lizards on a good, flat rock on Hornby Island, reading our books. I forget it was ever raining.
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I’m in Montréal with my sister, riding Bixi bikes through unknown streets of a city I’ve never been to before. I’m sharing a croissant with her in the sun, pulling flaky, buttery pastry apart. We’re at a Bicep gig and we’re dancing and vibing and we fucking ~deserved this, but the familiarity also makes me ache. Plunges me deep into memories and reveries that mix into a fever dream, blending past and future, and when we get home and crawl into bed I can’t help but message him because I feel so much right now and surely he still does too? But he doesn’t. And he’s cold and clinical. And it fractures something. I sleep a few hours and my sister slips out early and then I’m waiting at the half-marathon finish line, my heart in my throat, scanning the crowd, and then I’m throwing my arms around the gorgeous, sweaty, victorious mess of her and I’m crying and she’s crying.
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I’m on a farm in Alberta with two german shepherds at my heels, pulling on thick work boots to walk to the barn and feed the horses. The birch trees lining the property are golden yellow, the forest behind a flaming torch. My first real fall transition. I face off with the mean old rooster like every morning until he gets it through his featherbrain that I’m the boss, then I’m napping with the goats in the sun and kissing Steeve-O the donkey on his velvety nose. I whisper to him that he’s my favourite. One night, I step outside and see the sky alive with dancing lights, greens and blues and reds swirling above me. I stand there in my dressing gown with my headphones on, tearing up at how fucking beautiful it is. I send some videos through to friends and family and it’s the best I can do to share the moment, but really, it’s just the animals and me here. I’m so grateful for how bizarre my life is right now, but when I slip into bed, I feel the absence next to me a little more than usual.
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I’m alone in a small apartment room in the Rockies, faced with a series of closed doors. It’s cold and dark and I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going. I scroll on my phone and see a photo carousel pop up, soaked in Aussie sunshine. A hot tub. A sprawling hinterland view. An easel set up on a hillside with my paints in the grass and… the back of a brunette. It’s déjà vu, but it’s all wrong, and it feels like being spat at. Another door closes. The next morning, I wake up early and it’s first snow. Heavy flakes coming down thick, coating the road, the cars, the rooftops. It’s still dark and I don’t have snow gear yet but I don’t even think, I just grab a jacket and run outside and spend the next hour wandering the streets with my mouth hanging open, caught somewhere between a laugh and a sob, not really understanding the mix of feelings and not caring that my hair is wet and my face is numb because this is actually magic. My heart feels like it’ll burst and I just wish someone I loved was here with me, to see this and feel it with me, and I don’t know why I’m crying but tears are freezing on my face and it’s snowing.
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It’s nearing Christmas and I miss my friends. The weathers’ been bleak. I feel bleak. I’m seeing snapshots of their lives, of the moments I’d be sharing had I not left—coastal camping trips with familiar faces and new babies in tow, beach barbecues and dinner parties. I can almost feel the sun, the humidity. I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore. I see his family’s visiting for the holidays and I think how nice that would have been, to have had them up north with us when it was ours. I’m happy for him. And then they’re all out for dinner at our favourite restaurant in town, and standing next to his nan, where I would have been, is a new girl, beaming at the camera. I actually laugh, remembering his last words to me, and it’s not even about the girl at all, it’s about me. I look at his face and it’s still so familiar and yet he’s a stranger. How many empty promises, how much broken trust before I actually stop caring? I take a breath. I put the phone away. The new year rolls through without a word from him. The thread between us snaps.
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I’m sitting in front of the fireplace in an old house in Nelson. It’s warm and cosy with my back towards it, and the feeling is so delicious I almost groan. I pull on boots in the fire’s glow, smelling my white sage incense burning, and wander down the road through the snow to hot yoga, into a bendy, sweaty flow. Then I’m at my desk, working on some writing ideas, curious and content, and my family group chat rings. I answer laughing, thinking mum pocket dialled us. But then I see her face. And she’s crying. And adrenaline shoots up my spine. She says the unimaginable. I hear the words but they don’t make sense. My ears are ringing. I watch my siblings fall apart one after the other. Hear their screams. My sister sobbing so hard in the street she can’t breathe, freezing in the Norwegian cold. My brother now lying down in a gutter in Lisbon so he doesn’t pass out, earphones falling from his ears. I hear myself talk to them calmly, my voice level, organising, brain in crisis mode. The dissociation of it keeps my nausea down, for now, and this doesn’t feel like real life because how could this be real? Nothing makes sense and everything is broken and hollow and I am so far from everyone I love and nothing will ever be the same again.
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I’m in a beautiful home in Northern Idaho with a funny little dog and a cat, working on ideas for my novels. It’s minus eighteen outside and I’m snowed in, but I don’t mind. I have no plans on leaving anytime soon. I’m doodling maps and jotting down notes with a warm furball snoozing on my lap, falling into flow states that make me forget where I am. Later, I’m sitting in the sauna looking out over the estate in the fading light. Snow is still falling thick outside, the strangest contrast to the inferno of heat I’m sweating in. I’m resting and thinking about nothing when an idea for a character just drops in and it feels so right that I rush out to grab my phone and type it all down in my Notes, dripping sweat onto the floor, excited. I voice note my parents the next morning to tell them I think I really want to do this, to be a writer, that maybe it’s what I was always meant to be. But I’m terrified. I think of little Leïla with her face buried in fairytales and her mind full of stories, and I know she’d be elated, and that makes me feel more brave. For her, I’ll try.
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I’m up the hill at Whitewater, learning to snowboard for the first time. I’ve done a few days of lessons, and this is probably my last chance to practice before the snow melts into a sludge of mashed potatoes I don’t yet have the skillset to manoeuvre. They’re saying it might be the best day of the season—powder deepening by the hour, hardly anyone on the runs. All I know is I’m glad I hitchhiked up here this morning with my board cos my van wouldn’t have made it up in this snow. I felt like a badass, sitting there in the back of the truck all geared up, watching the trees fly past. My legs are jelly after days of using muscles in new ways and I have bruises on my ass, but I’m so happy I think I might explode. I ride the same chairlift again and again and again, joining my turns more smoothly, feeling the board float. I catch an edge and go down but the snow cushions my fall, powder spraying everywhere. I’m covered in it and IT’S SO FLUFFY!! I feel like a kid and this is the best thing ever and I’m straight back into the run, daring a bit more speed this time. The rush is so pure and full-bodied it feels illegal. I can’t get enough. I ride that hill til the chairlift closes. It’s still snowing. They could power a city with the joy I feel.
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The memories keep coming and I could keep writing and tell you about raccoons breaking in to eat the cat food in the kitchen and their weird little hands. My van overheating over the Kootenay Pass, and the forest of snowbound trees up there that looked like dinosaurs. A little firecracker with a Quebecois accent who gave me her overalls and made tortillas from scratch on my kitchen counter.
I could tell you about watching my mum lose it over a romp of sea otters and walking through old growth forests with her. A friend with green eyes like galaxies and a soft voice who made me smile more times than I can count. The night I watched an electric storm through the bedroom window of a house on a snowy hill, wrapped up in a cosy bubble of snacks and warm arms.
I could recount a plane ride over the Selkirk Mountains with a kind-hearted man who laughs in sunshine, and how the setting sun made Kootenay Lake glitter like molten bronze. The house party later that night—dancing for hours, then walking home bright-eyed in the fog, giggling, wrapped in a pile of shaggy coats, arm threaded with a blonde-haired fairy.
I could tell you about days when I didn’t know my own name, when I felt so alone I thought I might dissolve. And I could tell you of days I felt fucking unstoppable.
I don’t know how all of this, this spectrum of experience and emotion, can fit into one year. One me. But somehow, it does. The ripple effects of all my choices and the possibilities of infinite others leave my head spinning.
It’s chaotic and messy and uncomfortable to go through so much change, but I’ve also realised it’s actually the only constant in life, and a part of me is so goddamn alive from it. In a way, it kinda feels like play? Little taste testers of life.
Like being a wanderer is in my blood, older than this lifetime. Soul-coded through other worlds and timelines.
So much of this year was unraveling. So much of it was rebuilding. It’s wild that both can feel true.
One year in Canada.
A hundred little lives.
And next week, I’m moving on again. Leaving the friends I’ve made these past three months and the comfort of familiarity to start all over again someplace new.
How long for? Who knows. I sure as shit don’t.
But you can come along for the ride, if you like.
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I don't know where I'm going, but I know how to get there. — Boyd Varty