The Weather: The Biggest Reminder of Where I Used to Be

Weather is such a transportation tool.

Here, as I sit at my dining table doing homework problems, the sun’s rays are shining in through the big kitchen window. I feel the warmth on me, and it makes me happier.

I am starkly reminded by the memories I made in Yeosu, southern on the Korean peninsula. Back then, I travelled from Busan to Yeosu in early March, and the weather was perfect — flowers were blooming, the sun was shining, and it was warm enough for you to go out with a light sweater but not so warm that you’re dripping in sweat after.

These days I’m thinking a lot about those times.

I’m coming to peace with the memories — that that’s what they are, memories. They’re in the past now, but I enjoyed them while they lasted.

As the pain starts to fade away and scars (but also flowers) are left behind in my mind, I’m left with only a disillusioned reality of how great the experience was, and how privileged I was to be there.

There’s no more feeling like “I wish I did this" or “I wish I didn’t do that.” It’s simply a feeling of how someday, sometime in the far future, I’ll be looking back on it all and wishing to do it all over again. To feel the smiles again, to be that level of naive and innocent again, to have my bright eyes for exploring return.

People always talk about exchange, but they don’t mention how you come out of exchange realizing what’s important not because you were in a different culture, but because you tried and did so many things that you realized what’s not fulfilling.

What’s fulfilling to me is still the people I met. I wish to go back and continue friendships where we left off, and to continue to disillusion myself into believing that this is the life I would’ve lived in a another life.

Sure, I also get reminded of Europe when a certain chill falls over London, Ontario and when the rain gets drizzly. But there’s something more to reminiscing on a memory that was exactly one year ago — all the while feeling like it was so far yet so close ago. Thank you, to the weather here right now, to the people I met back then, and to the memories I made, because this — in its entirety — is the joyful rollercoaster ride called youth.