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#everyones like you're 1-2 months slow and im like NO YALL ARE JUST FAST AT SPRING
battle-of-alberta · 3 years
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celestialily replied to your post “To anyone: what happens if you're away from your...”
it’s 1am and exam week is over and this is TOO existential for me rn ok ok i saved all these pics to my phone for when they make sense. i cannot stop thinking about looking at familiar birds or ed hitching a ride back home. my whole life has been in these cities and i can barely fathom being away from them… fucking sweet penthouse details tho, u worked hard on those
Happy end of exam week and I'm Sorry For Giving You An Existential Crisis instead of a celebration.
It actually didn't occur to me that there would be people reading this who never leave home and it gave ME an existential crisis and I realized that every thing i write about these guys is undercut with homesickness. Like, I moved away from Edmonton age 9 across the continent to a foreign country right at the start of the War on Terror and I'm starting to accept that it /was/ traumatic for me and it /did/ inform a huge part of my perspective on things and has put me in this semi-permanent state of homesickness for "the life I was supposed to live where I didn't move away".
I started this blog while I was studying in Toronto and living with family in Victoria these past three years, I've been back in Edmonton for four months and I STILL have this sort of pandemic-induced homesickness that is a combination of "things have changed because time moved on without me, AGAIN" and "i can't do many of the things I used to do either because I'm no longer a student or because of restrictions" and its uh. Something that I've been dealing with my whole life and I guess these comics are a way to process... all... that.. stuff.
(also when i was growing up in Edmonton there's always going to be one friend who ends up moving to Calgary which when you're small sounds like they might as well be going to the ends of the earth and you'll never see them again. But also growing up in the public school system in a major city it feels like your friends coming from China and Kenya and all these places were like a day trip so IDK MAN TRAVEL IS WEIRD) (and also I think these guys feel bits and pieces of that immigrant diaspora as well as bits and pieces of urban indigeneity but it's not really my place to really analyze what that means in depth because I'm neither a new immigrant nor indigenous)
But yeah I am a uh very nostalgic person who is always trying to recapture those feelings of coming home, i get misty eyed on a plane in and I feel an extreme sense of satisfaction from setting on the path home and turning those familiar corners and I figure... if that's what gives me energy that's what must give them energy too. So I inject a lot of my childhood memories as well as new memories i've constructed as an adult with the knowledge I've gained about "what's different/special" from going away. Yeah :')
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