volume one hundred and seventy-two

a last day

Nov 29, 2024

📍Written on a last day, from Te Upoko-o-te-ika-a-Māui (Wellington area). It is all thanks to

’ Nature Journalling for Writers course with

One group of footprints leads to children kicking a soccer ball. The other — solo — leads to the water, where a fisherman heads out for work. It is our last day and all of the emotions that come with the last day of being somewhere you are not ready to leave are being carried on our shoulders as we walk in silence in the low-hanging sun.

I can hear waves, but they are soft. They do not crash, they curl. Children laugh and yell in friendly voices, tourists chat as they pull up seats, musicians move diner to diner serenading people for money they may or may not be tipped.

The saltiness of not-yet-dinner crustacea and fish still alive in the tanks hits the back of my nostrils, and I taste it as I walk. I smell piss and trash from the same alley, behind the tourist spot, hidden from those who would rather ignore it. I smell the condensation on everyone’s skin.

I buy steaming corn on the cob from a kitchen on wheels that struggles to move far in the sand. I eat with my hands and try not to let the buttery drips get the long, satin, flared sleeves of my jumpsuit. I feel thousands of small pieces of shell and sea rocks eroded to ocean soil getting caught between my toes in my not-beach-appropriate but rather-dinner-appropriate sandals, so I take them off.

Where I have always lived, where I have always been, where I have always bothered to go, I have only seen the sunrise over the ocean. It’s my first sunset on the beach.

Despite being a last day and therefore an ending, this is the beginning of so many more last days.

note: my shoes are undone after throwing them back on once we stepped off the sand

I had just had a birthday. I was so young and yet I felt as old and wise as the landscapes I looked out on each day, or as the elders who cooked me tofu and worked in the rice fields into their eighties. I was not. Nor was I as young and free as the children who played outside until bedtime.

I longed for more and I was failing at being present with the more I had just wished for. Everything around me was new and I soaked it up, lapped it up, ate it up, drank it up, photographed and uploaded it up — and yet my mind was always thinking “Okay! More new things! Where are you?”

I felt a sense of wanting to stay and go everywhere all at once. I needed to stay there because it was “somewhere else” but I needed to move on because there were so many “somewhere elses” to be.

I still long for “somewhere else” with a pen and paper in my hand and not a cocktail. Photos are taken to revisit beauty and recall every detail I might not be able to trust my memory with. I better explore, not just the parts offered to me at check-in. I linger longer. I sit in quiet. I let the wind blow through my ears as I keep my hand off the bike brake. I walk. I swim. I float. I tip. I learn from people whose families have loved the land for many generations. I dance. I write. I sing. I read. I stop and chat. I listen.

Lovely reader, head into the comments and tell me about a last day.

something i struggled with this week:

❤️‍🩹 Grief is wild and unpredictable and maybe you’ll find yourself sobbing crying at a stranger out of nowhere then laughing in the street with friends moments later.

a blessing from this week:

🌘 Reunited with someone I can be my whole self with, and who reminds me of the parts of me I can only be when I am with people like her. More of this.

a goal for the coming week:

👣 Be absolutely present and grateful in another last day and another first day.

pics or it didn’t happen: