where the sky meets the sea (answering the call)
Just over a week ago, I packed up my tiny car and hit the open road. I would drive 5 hours before hopping on a plane that would take me somewhere I’d never been, face to face with someone I’d only ever spoken to on a zoom screen, to work on a project without any guarantee how it would turn out.
Crazy? Maybe. But when the invitation to go arrived in my inbox earlier this year, I knew saying no wasn’t an option. With shaking hands, and a few tears, I said yes to a once in a lifetime opportunity and booked a plane ticket. If there’s one thing I know to be true about me its that I’m always up for an adventure.
The night before my plane was supposed to leave, I was in the guest bedroom of my parents house, wondering what I’d just gotten myself into. I called my friend, asking her why I’d done this to myself and why I thought I could handle this. “This is the kind of person you are,” She told me, “You can do big things.”
Something in me believed her. And when I arrived at the airport at 4:30am the next morning, I had no idea all the ways in which my life was going to change.
I’ve recounted the details of this trip to Vancouver over and over, mostly with ecstatic glee. Most of my texts to friends and family during my time by the ocean went something like “I’m so happy. I feel like I’m doing what I was meant to do.”
And as I’ve sat with these memories, I realized words will never be adequate in explaining the impact these 3 days had on me. The way every moment made it extremely clear that this is what I was meant to do, and that every wild turn in the road had brought me to this moment, for this reason.
Let me tell you about the ocean, and the way diving into the water made colours seem brighter, sounds clearer, and as the waves held my body all I could think of was where I was 3 years ago and I never never would have imagined this moment for myself.
I said later that it reminded me of the first time I went outside post transplant. Wrapped up in white blankets, wearing my husband’s bluejays ball cap, it was a hazy parking lot but I could have sworn in that moment I’d never seen something so beautiful in my entire life. I was here, I was alive, this is what grass felt like and clouds looked like, there was a squirrel climbing up a tree and that alone filled me with so much happiness I thought I would burst.
Going to the ocean was like that for me.
The line where the sky meets the sea, it calls me. And no one knows how far it goes.
During my most recent surgery back in November, one of the themes that made itself most prevalent followed the plot of the movie Moana. Restoring the heart of tefiti, the anger and rage that really was just a reflection of being separated from my truest self, and the lengths to which I would go to restore what had been severed.
Head back in the ocean, I howled at the sky, more love and longing in my body than can be expressed, knowing every moment before this one had brought me here. And here is exactly where I was always supposed to be. I was never not going to be here.
It’s been 8 months since that surgery, and next month I’ll hit the milestone of 3 years post transplant. The entire thing feels disorienting and terrifying and exciting and still not totally real.
Something new is taking shape in me during these months of survival, something I can’t totally name but feel its roots deep in the core of my being. A deep and profound sense of resilience, an unwavering belief in myself. Moments revealing to me I am exactly the kind of person I always dreamed I would become.
