This is brief. This is temporary. This is fleeting. And I know that. I know that more than I know anything. Do you know it? I'm going to tell you, in case you don't, but it's vain of me to assume you might not. Surely you must know. If you know, why don't you know that it makes me scared? Why don't you know it makes me want to leave? Why don't you know I can't commit? Oh wait. I did commit. Right? Right. (I think?)

Now that there's some semblance of a real plan, now that my next year is taking shape, now that I have a destination, the leaving is that much more real, and that's what makes this even more certainly brief.

I love this place. Everyone around me is talking about how they can't wait to leave Alberta, how they're never coming back. But this is home. My dad told me a couple days, or a couple weeks, or maybe even a couple months ago, (I don't know, time doesn't play much of a part in my mind these days, which is problematic when it comes to deadlines,) that I am a product of wide open spaces. And I like that thought, and I know that he is right. I love my prairie and my mountains and my wide open sky. I love having my own space and my own room to breath and people who love having the same things.

I suppose this home became important to me when I had to give it up for a year. I loved being overseas, even as a six year old I loved the trips and the hot hot heat and the funny people with their funny accents and funny clothes and funny herds of goats and their funny cars and how all the cars were white. And for a year Sudan was home, first at the Hilton, where I developed passions for rabbit stew on French night, and for after school swims, and for PB&J Otter. And then at the apartment, where my bedroom was three times the size of the one in Calgary and I felt like a princess because I got a mosquito net, and where the kitchen window looked out to the airport, and the rumble of planes taking off and landing and taxi-ing became background noises you barely even noticed. That was a home. That was my home. And I was so content there, until I came back a year later, in the middle of January, and adjusted from plus 40 to minus 40, and realized that there's one thing, which is really called base camp, and it's really nice and you can become very comfortable there and love a lot of things about it, but then there is this other thing, and it's called home, only it's said with a lot of emphasis, cause it's this huge deal. And Calgary is real home. And it took a good year of calling somewhere else home before I knew what it meant. And this is supposed to tell you how much I love this place we live, not because I'm leaving it behind for a while next year and because that makes me sad or scared, because it doesn't really. At least not sad or scared enough for it to overpower the exciting bits of moving away. It's supposed to tell you how much I love this place because I just think that it doesn't get enough recognition and I wish people would stop thinking of it as this evil den of ultra right-wing conservative thinkers who disapprove of gay marriage and abortion and equal rights, because Alberta is not that. It's just home.

Home.

Home.

Home.

Huh.

This doesn't mean I don't crave the ocean.

"The cure for anything is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."