Young Writers Society

A/N: This piece is inspired by Vincent Scarpa's "I Go Back to Berryman's" , which you can read here. This piece is intentionally meant to be one sentence, and belongs to my developing anthology Saturn. 

Chances are you got here not by car, but by the grace of goodness, diligence, and determination, and you got up the hill thanks to this one tall guy with a red beard and this one short girl who looks like a wood nymph, which makes sense really since Pearson is tucked away on the bay, between a detention centre and a DND base, this inconspicuous little place with a whole lot of mystery, so it makes sense that this guy and this girl look like an elf and a wood nymph, and when you walk up they stop at a sloping building, wrinkled and waterlogged by the West coast weather, and say Here you are, Japan House and you think that it’s hard to tell the trees from the buildings, but it’s home already because three people are carrying your two bags up one flight of stairs and your room is lofty and light, and you think I will never leave here because you are surrounded by the world in teacups, which brew discussion and love which you discover is the most painful feeling in the world and gets at the heart, aching and yawning like a sailboat stuck in the Juan de Fuca Strait, and you barely have time to ponder this even if you were to circle around campus, from Japan to Victoria to East to McLaughlin, not forgetting the Max Bell (which is much too far, let’s be honest) and you don’t even have time to contemplate Ondaatje, that odd little building that should house English literature and not visual art and has the windowless room that only locks from the inside and you two have to breathe softly, a whispering type of intimacy that is always awkward but never secret – but you don’t have time for this because you can’t help but run into one, two, countless people who hug you, lift you up, and put behind them your differences and their judgments because we are so far from home and only have each other, and you think this is why there are so many tears that pool at the bottom of the bay, rising up and meeting us in the spiritual centre where Christians gain strength from Muslims who gain strength from Buddhists who gain strength from Jews who gain strength from agnostics and atheists, and you realize that the spiritual centre is sacred not for faith but for strength to understand why you feel unloved in a place full of love or why people create meaning out of meaningless things, and then you begin to understand it for what it really is: that you are loved in a place full of love and mistakenly interpreting imitations of love for love, but you don’t know it yet – you won’t know it until years later, when you reread your love letters from people you didn’t know you loved or had loved you and the tears stream down your face, but not into the bay because the bay is too far or too full from years since, and all you wish you could do is go back to hug the people you didn’t love enough or loved too much, but they’re all gone now, in every different direction like the post of arrows in the centre of campus that point to seventeen different places, and you would only be able to get to them if you could stretch your arms around the planet like a rubber band that never breaks or never ricochets back with a stinging snap, so instead you pin up their postcards like hearts on sleeves and wait until twenty-twenty-four, when at last you’ll be back home and it’ll be like you never left.