TARYN THOMSON
I almost wrote this at three am. These days my body turns into an oven, and I wake on fire, damp and hot. All the stuff that weighs on me keeps my mind churning for a good while before I sleep again. I have been thinking about happiness lately and where it has gone. Not the “I just ate a delicious ice cream cone” kind of happiness, but that contented, settled alignment I have felt before. There is a stillness in this quality of happiness — a steadiness — a certainty. I realize this flavour of happiness cannot happen without a certain amount of freedom: the type of freedom I no longer have. The first time I felt truly free was after a four-month stint in Tel Aviv working as a nanny. I was nineteen years old. It was the job from hell and, although I was excited to be exploring Israel on my days off, I was miserable. One day my employer read my diary and I was so angry I decided to do a midnight flit. The escape was exciting. I packed secretly and slipped away, and I had a strange evening with some stoned Israeli soldiers and didn’t call home. Unfortunately, my employer did. She told my poor parents I had “run off with an Arab.” After a few nights in a Tel Aviv hostel, I took the bus down to Eilat, which is the resort town in Israel. In the hostel there, I met an amazing older woman who had just returned from India where she’d worked in Mother Teresa’s charity. I had been feeling off-kilter — panicked about up and leaving my job like that, worried about money and about being in a war-torn country virtually alone. She went through my backpack with me, the one I had overstuffed back home in Vancouver, and she urged me to pare it down. Around her, I felt grounded. My fear shifted, and I realized that I was completely free. The world opened up as a great possibility and a question mark. Nobody knew where I was; I was not expected anywhere. I had no responsibilities. All I had was a backpack and my savings. All that was before me was choice and adventure. Choice and adventure — both feel lacking in my life these days. Maybe these night sweats are my body’s battle cry. Rise up, she calls. Leave the dishes and the teenagers and the career and cat and lawn and neighbours and get the fuck out. Choice. Adventure. Freedom.