SEPTEMBER 1, 2019
We were about 15 minutes from the Dublin airport. I’d just made a note on my phone, having overheard an English couple sitting behind us as we passed through thriving, expanding downtown Dublin along the lovely Liffey River. The man said to his wife, “We are on the wrong side of history, arent’ we?”
“I want to stay,” said Chloe. She was serious and adamant. It was as if she had just awoken from a dream and her vision was clear. I wanted to stay, too. I never want this way of living to end — the happiness, freedom and comfort it has given us. I don’t want to return to a world where I am scratching and kicking, scrambling to survive, where I worry constantly. As we passed the ferry terminal, I saw a sign for the Dublin to Liverpool ferry and thought, I wish we were getting on that ferry not an airplane home.
I didn’t tell Chloe what I’d thought about the ferry. Instead, I asked, “Are you serious?”
“Yes, I want to stay. Can we figure out how to do it?”
“It’s kind of late but maybe.”
“I can go to school online,” she said. “Give me your phone.” I handed her my phone, the only one with data. She started looking up online colleges. I thought about how nice it would be to have more time to write and get my remote life in order, maybe apply for teaching jobs at International Schools.
“Can we get a refund on your tuition?” I asked. She looked that up, too. She found Purdue College online. She found a housesit in London for over a month. She said that if she withdrew from Langara by Sept. 2, we would get a full refund.
I know that I am worth more financially when renting our apartment than trying, as I constantly do try, to find work that pays so poorly in Vancouver.
“What about your friends?” I asked.
“I want to be happy. I would even go back to Milan to work.” We pulled into Terminal One at the Airport, piled our bags on a cart outside, wheeled them into the busy terminal, and found a bench to sit on. “If we do this, we have to do it quickly,” I said, pulling out my computer. I found a housesit in Ireland that started in six days. Chloe was looking up other options on the phone.
We could Airbnb our Vancouver apartment until it rented again…and make up the difference of the airline ticket in one month. Our hearts were racing, running from the sadness that had consumed us the last few days, toward hope.
I thought about our cat, Sashi; doctors appointments that I’d made; the car insurance I was buying in two days; the home owner’s insurance I just purchased for $1,000; the studio lease I just signed.
We were clinging to what we knew, with certainty — we hadn’t had enough of this kind of living, not for now. What was smart? And does smart matter? Time was running out. We either had to check in to our flight or stay.
I looked at the cost of flights from Vancouver to London in a week. It would be about the same as what we would lose if we missed this flight. I asked Chloe if she would miss doing Vancouver fashion week in October. “No,” was her very clear answer.
“I worry that if we go back now, we will have a hard time returning again. That we won’t do it,” she said.
I decided, wrongly or rightly, that we should return, think more, put things in order and come back as soon as possible…maybe a week, maybe a month, maybe a couple of months.
For ten hours, we flew on a comfortable, shiny new Westjet plane with ample leg room and good food from Dublin to Calgary, and then on a smaller, less shiny Westjet plane from Calgary to Vancouver. Our friend, Trevor, who took us to the airport a year before, picked us up. As he drove, he told stories of life in Vancouver. The beautiful city had lost its sheen for us. It had changed little and felt small. We recognized familiar faces from the neighborhood, the faces of poverty, drug addiction and homelessness as we stepped over garbage on the dirty, wide, cement sidewalk in front of our apartment building. The newly lobby was renovated, a $100,000 project that made it look like a corporate office lobby. Talk about about wasting money. After dragging our bags to our apartment, we headed to Olympic Village to eat. The food was overpriced, the restaurant pretentious, the people loud. It felt like the balloon string was slipping from our hands as we tried to cling to where we had come from.
We learned so much in this past year. We learned how to be happy. Normalcy be damned….this is a new world.
