Jamie Jane

Christmas day hasn’t been like this in a long time; at least 2 or 3 years. I had the greatest time with every single family and friend that showed up at my aunt’s home. 

Although time flew by, there were just some noticeable difference from over the years: 

• The young ones are now in elementary school, and some of them are hitting puberty. I still remember them with awkward haircuts and playing ‘house’ in and around one room. 
• The ones that were in elementary are now legal to drive, vote, and drink - everyone was offered a shot of liquor with not a second thought. 
• boyfriends and girlfriends, or just friends of the family showed up with high spirits, and showed them that family is what it is all about by including them in our karaoke singing, dancing, gambling and drinking. I mean, they are pretty much a part of a family if they can survive. 
• there were three dogs and a few babies. All the babies were accused of pooping by the nativity scene. That is still unresolved as to who it was. 

Everyone was congratulating me on finishing university with my degree, yada yada yada, and that includes my kuya Aaron, who I haven’t seen in three years. He lives in Edmonton now, visiting his family during the important holiday season, but we have always missed each other every.single.time. It would either be that I would have just left, and he’d arrive, or that he would leave when I arrive. The timing was never right. Finally, he shook my hand and gave me a huge hug, and couldn’t believe that school is over and done with.

The family has been going through a lot: turmoil of unresolved hatred, deaths, and so forth, but at the end of the night, we still are here. In this moment. I swear it was infinite, and so was the alcohol. 

My landlord is lovely. The night before I left to go back to Vancouver, she came over in her rob and slippers to say goodbye and gave me a hug. She greeted the others as they were her own. 

The one thing I did forget to give her are the keys to the Wenman home. I don’t know if I should hand them back, like a good tenant would, or keep them for myself, as a special reminder as what was my first home-away-from-home, to be put into a shadowbox or memory case, as it very well was. 

There were three keys, one for the front door; one for the back door; and one for the bike shed. I only used one, ever. I never used the backdoor, but would use the glass sliding door instead, and I didn’t own a bike in VIctoria. The front door is all that I really needed. Just one. 

I keep using that key to enter into the home I use now, and I forget time and again that it was not that home I was entering, but the other. Both are kept on a golden key ring of mine, and I don’t think I ever will. It seems just fitting. One key for the place I live in now, the one that I did live in, and the car key that gets me to go from one to the other. 

Sorry Mary, I guess I’ll be keeping the thing that links me to my past, and will be following me everywhere I go. 

Enough with the instagrams and reblogs, it’s time to get back to my grassroots of writing. I can only abstain from something for so long until inspiration hits me like the unsettling reality of my graduation. No more school, or courses to take, but now bills to pay and student loans to repay. I can’t say I miss school just yet, but the yearning of education is still in place. Accumulating knowledge and creativity is what I still need. 

Although I am not a poet, or a journalist, I would like to think I write with a passion of intimacy and an unrelenting hope. I never know what this blog has become or will be. I can only hope that it can only lead to more opportunities of something, somewhere, or beyond my imagination. Maybe this can lead to something. This can at least be a figurative memory album of my internet past. 

Hopefully from now until the end of the internet, this will still be here. I will still be here. 

I will be up in four hours to drop off a roommate at an airport and catch the seven am ferry, leaving Victoria.

I having been stressed during his whole process of moving since the end of the semester. It is not because of the sheer load of things I own (I own A LOT of things) that had to be stuffed in bags or suitcases into a small vehicle, but the simple idea of moving away from such a wonderful place that was really my home away from home. Actually, It was my home. My roommates and myself have made it that way.

I’ve said goodbye to many people here today and yesterday. I said goodbye to my close ex-roommate and friend Bryce today, who herself will be moving back to San Diego in five days, because she has also finished university. Dropping her off, I caught myself feeling sad, but not mournful.

I do want things to stay the same. I am not ready to enter the real world just yet. I want to live with roommates. These roommates who I have lived with for 1,2,3 or 4 semesters. The same people that have taught me that home is not a place, but a feeling.