Sand falls from my purse and onto the sandalwood flooring in my boyfriend’s downtown Toronto bedroom. It’s an accidental but happy reunion. Brazil followed me onto the plane, and later as I creep alongside Lake Ontario, I swear the Atlantic creeps its way into each wave just by the roar of ice crashing. Would the winter waves try to swallow me whole like the aggressive splash on Ipanema beach? How do I describe what it felt like to save my belongings, phone in hand, as the sudden onslaught of water came over the crowds? In Brazil, it was so easy to reach into the kindness of others and suddenly you were being offered a free chair and umbrella as you rinsed out the sand from your beach towel. In Canada, even if the chill came over me and had me shivering, would anyone help? Would anyone offer me their gloves or their scarf?
That is how I carry the lands stuck in constant Pangea within me. I compare, I contrast. The Scarborough Bluffs are a second home, but never like the once perfect beaches in Natal that they covered with black sand to push the ocean back. Maybe each time I travel from home to home there is an ocean within me scattering my belongings, drenching me in salt, and laying me out to dry in a familiar yet all wrong shore. I carry my ice skates in my hand sometimes, the same way I was just carrying a surfboard, and the same way I was carrying a thermos and my maté.
And if I don’t compare and contrast, the lands seem to swallow me whole from thousands of kilometres away. How can I enjoy this frozen sunrise when there is a golden hour in my grandmother’s town that I will not be seeing? What if that sunset and sunrise coexisted, and I didn’t have to leap into the skies on a metal junket to traverse my way back home. How do I carry the land? It’s the sand still in my purse. It’s the pang of heat when I hike up a cliff, but look out and see urban forest rather than tropical rainforest. Is it the places I have only spent hours in? The seashells imbedded into the rock at Puerto Pyramides? Or perhaps it’s the sand and horse crabs I would put into a water bottle and take home from the beach when I was younger. Maybe it’s the places I haven’t been to yet, like the sunset over Patagonia that will connect North America to South America in my heart because the land is all around me, all the time. And it’s no where near me, because I belong to many lands. They’ve all crashed around into my veins, and I bare their existence like they are forced to bear mine.
And maybe it’s my tears, when I leave one place by making line to say goodbye to loved ones from a window in the sky. When they escape my eyes, the ocean returns to Lake Ontario and vice versa. If only the mango tree grew so tall that I could climb it and see all my lands, like a beanstalk into the sky that reminds me fantasy does coexist with reality. And darn it, if the land isn’t fantastical. The grit of being pulled under over and over in the waves until you are swept in and spit back out is pure magic, the kind the threatens your mortality and shoots adrenaline and reality into you like the best kind of heroine and then you’re suddenly off the plane, and you aren’t sure of when you will meet the magic in the land again and so you have to hunt the creeks of Toronto until the splash sounds similar and you can pretend the rock is a seashell and then you go to bed that night and you soak in the joy the land gave you, but there’s a part of you that misses Pangea.
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