12 Months, 21 Days, and Another Year

“Are you sure you want to do this?” was the only utterance, phrased as a question, my mother could evoke moments after I informed her I was moving to Costa Rica. On that day, in the spring of 2010, I assured her that I would only be gone for six months with the rationale of finding myself, escaping winter, and fulfilling study abroad experiences that had up until then eluded me. Almost four years later, I returned to Canada for good.

The ice storm was a nice welcome back.

The ice storm was a nice welcome back, three days after arrival.

375 days ago I arrived in Toronto, severely hung-over and sunburnt, without a plan or idea of what the future might entail. I wrote at the time that coming back to Canada was as much a move abroad as leaving was, and the parallels, over a year later, have proven that to be true.

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What’s Old is New Again

CS1Blackouts. Ice storms. Christmas. New Years. Something called a polar vortex. It’s certainly been an eventful few weeks back.

Though I’ve been back numerous times in my three and a half year absence from living in Canada, those visits differed greatly from this one. Every other visit had a specific end date; I always had a ticket back to Costa Rica. This time I don’t. That’s not to say that I’m back in Toronto indefinitely – that isn’t true – but I don’t have any definite plans to leave. This changes things considerably.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth noting again. When you visit home on a temporary basis, you never escape vacation mode. There’s a hard beginning, and a hard end. You know how much time you have, and hope to accomplish as much as you can within that time frame. If you don’t do one or two things, or miss out on seeing a few friends, you know you’ll catch them next time. Not the end of the world.

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