Author: goodnightmere

When Life Gives You Lemons

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“Lululemon is hiring for the holidays,” my friend Julie said through a mouthful of greasy chicken wings. It had been ages since we last saw each other. After backpacking Europe, I was finally home, only to have her tell me she was moving to B.C. at the end of the month. “You should apply,” she told me, but I was too distracted by the thought of her leaving…and should I get the smokey barbecue or the honey garlic? A few weeks later I was starting my first day at the very store she just left. She packed her life into a car and drove across the country to live amongst mountains. While I drove approximately 17 minutes from my parent’s house back to Square One…literally. I wore flip flops with cropped leggings that came down to my ankles. I barley looked up from them as I flip flopped around the store, smiling hard to hide the nerves and mispronouncing everyone’s name. I was the new girl, the little one with all the questions. “How can pants …

A (Very Short) Love Story

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My warm face pressed into the backseat window, it was the only thing that made my mind, spinning with thoughts and several Moscow Mules, go still. I looked at him sitting in the passenger seat where he scrolled through his phone to find my favourite country song. He turned around to look at me and smiled. I smiled back, then turned away, my breath fogging up the cold glass as I sang along. He asked me to be his girlfriend earlier that night and we lived happily ever after. Jks, we broke up six days later. “I don’t want you to hold me back,” I told him, after my friends left and the house was quiet. “I don’t want you to hold me back,” he replied, his blue eyes meeting mine. I didn’t turn away this time, I was getting better at the whole eye contact thing. He explained that relationships aren’t about holding each other back and, although my cognitive skills were impaired, I understood. “We have to tell each other everything and always be honest,” he insisted, …

Lost in Translatopn

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My heavy feet dragged their way through Tokyo Narita Airport, my brain was still somewhere over the Pacific Ocean – in the plane’s bathroom where I mistook the mouthwash for soap and scrubbed my hands with it – and would hopefully catch up with me later. It had been a long flight and the free Singapore Slings seemed like a good idea at the time and why is this soap burning my hands? “Konbanwa!” The lady behind the front desk said as I walked through the automatic doors. “Konbanwa!” I repeated back to her like a drunk parrot. I hath not known what I said, nor where I was. I squinted under the bright lights and nodded while she spoke words I would never understand. Then she bowed and handed me a locker key and a bag containing slippers, a tooth brush, and a giant grey night shirt. She placed her pointer finger to her lips, then to a door with  a “quiet, please” sign on it. I bowed back to her, opened the door and entered the …

Kenya: Part Two

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As the the morning sun shone over Nairobi National Park, we stuffed our faces with breakfast, stuffed the trucks with bags, stuffed our faces with second breakfast and began our journey into the wild – a road trip split up over two days. Because one does not simply walk to the Masai Mara. I watched Nairobi’s concrete jungle get smaller and smaller in the review mirror until the skyscrapers looked like towers for ants. Ahead of us, The Great Rift Valley waited patiently for our arrival. What’s a few hours, when you’ve been around some 25 million years. This 6,400 km long crack in the Earth’s surface has stacked up quite the resume over those millions of years. It reaches from Northern Syria to Mozambique in East Africa, almost broke the continent in two, has some of the world’s deepest fresh and salt water lakes, Africa’s tallest mountains call it home, Astronauts say it’s the most significantly visible detail on Earth from space, it’s lined with active and semi active volcanoes, abundant wildlife, horizonless savannahs, vast grasslands, okay, okay we …

Osheaga

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“I wasn’t going to come, but then my friend was like, you gotta live.” No truer words have ever been spoken by my dear friend Danielle. You’re damn right you gotta live. And so every summer we go to a music festival, where we sleep on floors, eat from trucks, sing at the top of our lungs and dance so hard we nearly pass out, sometimes we do. But most importantly, we live…like degenerates, mind you, but man is it ever fun. And by the end of it all, we are exhausted. Reality looms in the distance after escaping it for days. I must return to the land of shirts that cover my belly button and toilets that flush. My back hurts, my voice sounds like Lindsay Lohan in the morning, and I have PTSD from porta potties. All I want is to be horizontal in my bed, but instead I have to spend 11 hours on a bus with no bathroom. Everything hurts. I regret nothing… We arrived in Montreal just as the sun was going down, it …

Kenya: Part One

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A few months ago, if you were to tell me that I’d be flying business class to Ethiopia, I would have asked you to kindly share the drugs you were on. Why on Earth would I be going to Ethiopia? And business class? Are you out of your mind? I don’t own a business. I don’t even own a hairbrush. But alas, there I was at 10 in the morning, drinking champagne in motherfuckin’ business class, on route to Ethiopia, with 37 dollars in my bank account. You see, this was not my seat that reclined four different ways, nor was this my trip. It was my dad’s and I stole it from him. Or at least that’s how it felt when he couldn’t go and I took his place. I was a con artist, goodbye Meredith, hello Miss Hardie in seat 3A. Only I broke the one rule every good con artist knows – don’t draw attention to yourself. Which is pretty easy to do when you are dressed in full safari gear. You know how people wear Hawaiian shirts …