I will remember

This time last year I was off on the greatest adventure of my life so far. I learned so much while I was in Switzerland. Not only did I become proficient and confident in my second language, but I also grew as a person and saw a part of the world that took my breath away. It gave me a yearning for adventure, a love of airports and a joy of stumbling through conversations as I force my tongue to make new sounds. I know wanderlust is an overused term but this was my view of it. This is my wanderlust. I want to truly experience the world not just see it.  

I stood at the foot of the mountain pictured on the wrapper of a Toblerone chocolate bar.

Also

known

as

the Matterhorn

It’s one of the most well-known sites in Switzerland

An icon,

my camera roll is full of photos

but as I stood in it’s shadow

I come to the realization

pictures

don’t do justice.

And I remember thinking.

God. Please make this stick in my mind. So I can go back and play this day over and over like a home video, the film rolling through my brain, the images tumbling clearly as if I was seeing them for the first time. Please. Tattoo these memories, engrave them on the inside of my skull.

I want to remember

I know now

I don’t want to be a tourist

with nothing but a few photos of a

half remembered family vacation and a sunburn that disappears after a week

I

want a backpack

I want upside down maps

I want language barriers and

I want native speakers with not a word of English on their tongues

I want dirt roads

and I want to make the kind of friends who welcome you into their home

A stranger one day

and a friend

still five years later

I want to get lost in unknown cities

and find Sam in the process.

The world is wide

and it can be scary

and I know I won’t get to see it all

But I want to collect as much of it as I can

like the smooth round pebbles I used to pick up as a kid

I will slip memories into my pocket and feel

their weight as I walk,

remembering brown faces with crooked smiles and eyes

as wise as the mountains,

warm spicy scents that burn my nose

in the best possible way

I will pretend my skin still carries the dust of a country I miss

even though

it’s long since washed away.

And when I have children I will teach them

to carry backpacks

and draw their own maps

and let them get lost in the backyard to find themselves.

When I have grandchildren

I will reach into a pocket

almost forgotten

and pull out a stone.

Worn smooth as sea glass from the rubbing of fingers over the years

I will hold it like the Aboriginal chiefs

hold a totem pole to help remember the details of a legend

I will speak

let the memories rise up

smells and sights from long ago faded coming rushing back like

a river thawing in spring

I will tell them about standing in the shadow of the Matterhorn

I will tell them about a song sung round a campfire in a language I barely understood

I will tell them how I sang anyway

I will explain that I found part of Sam in a village in the south of Thailand

and another piece of her in the sand on the beaches of Peru

I will explain how bits of her were hidden in places I hadn’t expected

like the hallway of my high school

and a box

in the corner of my mother’s basement.

I will tell them I found Sam spread all over the earth

like Isis found Osiris in Egyptian times,

I will tell them to get lost

When they ask to see pictures I don’t have, I will describe

the smile of a girl whose name has long been lost and buried in the filing cabinet of my mind

but who’s smile I will never forget

or  the sound of a crowded street, people rushing about , strangers

who were really just friends I hadn’t yet met

I will describe the smell of an ocean.

I will give them a Toblerone bar

I will tell them to make friends with everyone they meet

The world is wide

I know I won’t see all of it but

I’ll try

I will collect cities and people and languages and love and I will hold them close in my pocket

And I will use them as touchstones

To remember

God. Please. Make this stick in my mind like a home video, I will rewind the tape over and over and pray I don’t wear it out. Help me to decipher the carvings I once made but now can barely recognize. Please

I will discover

and then

I will remember

The Imitation Game

*possible spoilers, proceed with caution!*

“Are you paying attention? Good. If you are not listening carefully, you will miss things.”

This is the opening line of the movie The Imitation Game, which centres itself around the story of Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician who cracked the Nazi enigma code during WWII. He and a group of other linguists and code breakers spend two years building a machine called Christopher capable of sorting through millions upon millions of possible settings for the enigma machine that could be used to crack intercepted Nazi radio communications.

Turing is an eccentric character to say the least. Incredibly intelligent, fairly arrogant and socially awkward, he reminded me a  bit of Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. Played by Benedict Cumberbatch, the acting was really good and I found myself silently egging on the characters, totally engrossed in complexity of the enigma code and the puzzle of trying to solve it. When they finally did, I actually said “wow” aloud in the theatre. The whole concept appealed to my curiosity. The part that broke my heart was at the end. Turing is arrested for being a homosexual, fired from the job he loves, and put on government mandated hormone therapy that changes who he is, to the point where he can’t even complete a crossword puzzle. He ends up killing himself.

I think we as humans are inherently afraid of the things we don’t understand. Most of us cannot even begin to fathom the way Turing’s brain worked or how he came up with the things he did. Why didn’t I know his name before today? I knew about Einstein and Churchill and Steve Jobs. Historians predict that the cracking of the enigma code ended the war 2 years sooner and saved 14 million lives more than if it had never been solved. And yet I didn’t even know the name of the man who did that, who was the first person to dream of a machine like the one I am writing on at this moment. But he was odd and he was gay. His was judged by his perceived shortcomings rather than praised for his incredible talents and because of that he was lost to our world too soon. Looking at his accomplishments in the 41 years he lived, who knows what he could have done if his life had lasted 60, 70, 80 years? We won’t ever know.

The movie itself was incredible and so interesting to watch however more than that it made me think about the world I live in today. We consistently as a society look for ways to judge each other rather than admire each other. Who cares how talented someone is, they’re ugly. Who cares how intelligent someone is, I don’t agree with their lifestyle. Who cares how kind hearted someone is, they annoy me. And we isolate and push each other away instead of coming together as a community. What if we all helped patch the holes in each other’s weaknesses? Used each other’s strengths to overcome our weaknesses? I’m kind of off on a tangent at this point but it really broke my heart to watch the story of a brilliant man crumble because people couldn’t look past their own bias’ to see the good he brought to the table.

“Sometimes it is the people who no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”

Who are you misjudging?

P.S. It’s a beautiful film. I’ll see it again and I think you should too 🙂