We go anyway

“Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” - The Velveteen Rabbit.

Cameron and I were halfway to nowhere with an adopted cat and a tent in the backseat of his maroon station wagon. The car had failed us a few times already, most recently a few days before 200kms from Carsten, a small highway town in the wilderness of British Columba. Great trails of tyre had flayed away to expose the criss-cross of white stitching. We were towed by a sour-faced man to a motel above a pub. We snuck the cat past drunk and smoking locals to our $15 room. The bathwater was yellow and reeked of gasoline.

It was June, 2006. We had met a few weeks earlier, by a lake, on a searing hot summer afternoon. We never asked what we were doing there, together, with a cat and a vague plan to drive to the Northern Lights of Canada. We never asked what, because the why was simple: we were in love.

We loved like we had never been hurt before, because we hadn’t been. Not really. Our teenage transgressions - sweaty hand holding in darkened cinemas, fumbles in the back of darkened cars, pensive love letters scrawled – all of them combined didn’t approximate half of the overwhelm, the vulnerability, the grace or the beauty. It was the falling sensation the moment you fall asleep; unexpected and yet as familiar as our own bones.

The memory of that trip returns to me often, unbidden. If it’s true that cells renew themselves every seven years, then I am not the same person I was then. But if it’s also true that muscle memory imprints itself, then how could I be anyone else?

In the children’s book The Velveteen Rabbit, The Skin Horse gives advice to a little boy’s toy rabbit.

“Real isn’t how you are made,” he said. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse.

They say you don't really grow up until two things happen to you: love, and pain. Usually, the first results in the second. But when you are young, and especially when you are in love, you never expect it to happen to you. Cameron and I drove north wanting to see something we had never seen before; a brilliant green and azure weaving against a black sky, and for three weeks we fell asleep with the colours dancing before our eyes.

Instead of the lights we found a sleepy salt-coated town and cold, coin-operated campground showers. We walked beside a river of dead and dying salmon trying, and failing, to reach somewhere upstream. We drove back to the city laughing at our misfortune but never really feeling any loss. We knew we had found something more precious than the lights.

Five years later, I left Cameron. I had grown up in those five years: we had travelled the world, adopted a dog, lived in a campervan, gotten married. I had graduated from university and written a book. We had developed and overcome addictions, lost family members, and somewhere along the way, lost ourselves. My heart had run the gauntlet and was bigger from having been broken. But it was still broken. It would be many years before I began mending.

It was an unexpected journey, one filled with pain and brilliant flashes of beauty. It did not end the way that I expected. And we never did end up seeing those Northern Lights.

But if you knew that every love affair you embarked on would end, would you still start them? Knowing that you leave parts of yourself in everyone you love?

The purpose of living is to give yourself away. Take risks, break your own heart, fall over, fall apart. The purpose of living is to die in a million small ways. Because you end up remaking yourself out of those broken pieces. You collect pieces of other people, for good or for bad. You grow bigger than you were before. Your past becomes a paint-by-numbers for the new you, an impossibly intricate and devastatingly beautiful map and none of us knows the destination.

It doesn’t matter.

We go anyway.