So much is changing and preparing to change, just this week even, that I’ve been savouring a lot more about the little things that I know will be different soon.
I am excited to move in with fiancé and A next week, to move into a beautiful new neighbourhood and to decorate a nice, bigger, new place. But I’ll miss days like yesterday. I was packing up boxes and nursing a hangover when I got a call from best friend A. “My mum and I are just going to eat at Saigon, this Vietnamese place by Meditheo, you want to come?” I’ll miss random calls to meet people who are down in the market and think to call me. Saigon was like what I know of Chinese food, but expanded. I loved my spring rolls and my friend’s sweet and sour soup was an interesting but too sweet blend of sauces, herbs noodles and pineapples. I’lll miss the market’s restaurants: No chain restaurants, just wonderfully kitschy and unique eateries representing food choices from everywhere. (I think my favourite new food I’ve tried this year is pad Thai). I ate a croissant from La Boulangerie Français, which bakes the best croissants to ever pass through my lips. I’ll miss walking by that bakery’s doors, smelling the buttered pastry every day. Best friend and then came back to the apartment to drink blueberry and orange pekoe tea, and I continued packing my dishes, my picture frames, my DVDs and the other ingredients to this past year’s adventures in my first apartment. But now it’s time to move onward and upwards. I understand a little of how Wendy felt, but also how Peter Pan did as well.
I also realized that in this new place, I’m going to have to resolve to put some things in boxes. Things that will likely not see the light of day until the faraway day I want to reminisce by going through boxes with my name written on them. Maybe I’ll have kids to show the boxes’ contents to, or maybe I’ll just need to open it and smell the smell of my past. I understand that in a bedroom I share with my fiancé, I cannot hang homemade frames that hold pictures of my girlfriends and me in grade eight. I can’t hang the pink baby girl who sleeps on a silk cloud with stuffed, pastel-coloured stars. I certainly can’t put the homemade pillow from my best friends on my newly shared bed—it has a picture of their faces on a pink flowered background. It’s all a part of growing up. I know I can’t have Mardi Gras beads hang from my doorknob forever. But the act of physically moving on from my teenage décor is another reminder that this time, the changes are for good. Some things will be packed in boxes and sent to my mum’s, not the new apartment. I’m not sure if it’s sad or just an opportunity to bid adieu to one chapter while I excitedly turn the page to the next.