Epilogue: Catching life by the throat

Erin woke up at 6:00 this morning to go to the pool, and came back an hour later wide-eyed and bushy-tailed, trying to engage in conversation, a futile endeavor given my starfish, commatose state (I actually attempted to stay up to see how the hockey game ended - although, admitedly, the only reason I know the Canucks won was because the uproarious commotion from the commentators when Sedin scored jarred me from my sleep).

At 11:30 I finally tore myself away from the comforts of the hotel room to venture out into the grey, windy, oh-so-chilly (yet pleasantly picturesque) streets.

I can't count how many pictures I inadvertently walked through. It was, in my defense, unavoidable. Countless people are going to return from their trip with me in the background of their pictures. (What a crazy thought) And they choose to pose in front of the most random things. Some I get: the Empress hotel - makes sense; the harbour - I get that; even giant stuffed grizzlies - I'll give it to them. If I were walking down the street in Japan and saw a giant stuffed Sumo wrestler, or piece of sushi, I'd pose with it, too. But others... I just want to go up to people with a pen as a microphone and say, "Why THIS backdrop?"

Everywhere I go in downtown Victoria seems to implore me to "re-connect" with my "Irish roots," to buy a wool sweater or anything tartan. A block later and it's English tea time in a tudor-style cafe sitting kitty-corner to a shop of First Nations bric-a-brac, its windows full of signs in Japanese. Down the road people are asking me if I've found Jesus and handing me salvation cards (which I politely decline) outside the gates to China town, and I feel on the verge of an identity crisis. Harmonica-playing mimes on unicycles deke out Japanese tourists plodding along like schools of fish, taking pictures of lethargic-looking horses strapped to carriages, and dred-lock-sporting peudo-homeless youth squat in doorways selling hacky sacs (I turn the symbol of my Starbucks mug away from them when I walk by - for some reason I care what they think). This, I suppose, is the appeal of Victoria, or Canada, for that matter: a kind of schizophrenic diversity we call multiculturalism.

I got blissfully lost in Beacon Hill Park - a.k.a. the world bird poo capital - and sat on a bench in memory of Georgina somebody-or-other, suspiciously eyeing crows who suspiciously eyed me back (as if I was competition for the garbage they were pecking at on the lawn).

And if you ever go wandering along Government Street - where Emily Carr's house is - along roads lined with colonial-era cottages-turned-B & Bs, with rose bushes in every yard and lazy cats in every sun-drenched bay window, listen to Jose Gonzales' Heartbeats. In fact, put it on repeat. You won't get sick of it - I promise.

Then sit at the park that looks over the water at the end of the road (I only discovered it because I was lured by an enticing little gravel path). To the left a windswept, craggly, cliffy vista that conjures up images of some Thomas Hardy novel, and to the right a Pacific Northwest landscape, with layers of low-lying mountains in varying gradients of slate blue. Pair this with a little Iron and Wine and you won't be sorry.

This place, with its fresh, breezy lightness and expanse of glimmering ocean, somehow balances out Larkin's heavy existentialism, which sits on my lap in the form of a dog-eared book, its pages flapping in the wind.

"I see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude," he writes. The sentences jumps off the page at me as I sit alone on a park bench watching people amble by. I've never been so glad to be in nobody's company than my own.

Yet ironically (paradoxically?) he says at another point, "What will survive us is love," which I read as the little voices in my little white earphones sing, "There are times that walk from you like some passing afternoon, summer warmed the open window of her honeymoon," just as the sun finally comes out for the first time today. And the combination of those three experiences at once: reading that Larkin line, hearing that Iron and Wine lyric, and the sun warming me, makes my heart skip a beat for a minute.

I look up and the birds above and the boats below go sailing past while the grass waves in the breeze, and the song plays on: "There are things that drift away like our endless numbered days, autumn blew the quilt right off the perfect bed she made... There are sailing ships that pass on our bodies in the grass, sprintime calls her children til she lets them go at last... a baby sleeps in all our bones so scared to be alone," while Larkin continues to write about solitude and the significance of small events, like a visit to an empty church, that "gives weight to the ordinary dreams and fears of our daily lives, lived out as they are in the shadow of eternity."

It's almost too much for me to process. Yes, yes, yes.