Like the Wind in the Trees

So recently I was inspired by a friend's works to write something in a different style, in contrast to the [pseudo]fiction works I normally write.

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You know, when people arrive at a new place, they always have that first thing that they must do, such a first thing that brims with expectation and burns with desire. I could think of a few things that I always had to do as soon as possible when I arrived somewhere. The first thing that I had to do when I visited California was to get In-N-Out. When I arrived back in Evanston for the start of a new term I would always get my first meal at the local Five Guys, as it was the first restaurant that I entered in Evanston. If I returned back to China, the first thing that was on my mind was to collapse on a bed after not having had much quality sleep on the plane ride.

Vancouver – I hadn’t really thought about that. I mean, I’m going home, right? That should suffice. But that’s not special enough. It seems too pedestrian to label ‘going home’ as your most urgent, must-do, thing upon returning to the city around which you lived most of your life.

Anyways, that question was on my mind as I walked through the very familiar last pair of automatic glass doors, the doors that separated the interior of the Vancouver International Airport from the outside world. Then I thought of an answer.

The second I would walk outside, I would exhale. Not any regular exhalation, but one in which I would try to exude as much air as warm as possible from my system. I wanted to see my breath condense. So the tiny child was filled with expectant glee as I walked past the crowd of people at the airport exit waiting to meet up with people, friends waiting for friends talking amongst themselves, as friends, while waiting for their friend to arrive, and also, more formalized airport greetings of people holding up signs that usually had a name in large print. Actually, I was singularly focused on just getting out of the airport to see my breath condense, that I paid no attention to the composition of the crowd of waiting people. I based my description off of what I had seen the tens of other times I had been in this exact position.

Seeing my breath? Well, most people would look at me with a perplexed face and would wonder why I came back to Vancouver just to see my breath. I would tell them that I was also returning home. They would then retort that since I valued seeing my own breath so much that it was the singular first thing that was on my mind after stepping out of the airport, that I valued it more than going home. Isn’t that a contorted form of logic? Of course that was not true.

Perhaps if I told them about how unseasonably warm it was in Chicago for the past two weeks they would see my logic a bit clearer. I had often bragged to my Californian friends, by showing them the 80 degree plus temperature readings in Evanston, that we had stolen their lovely, warm and sunny Southern Californian weather, and transplanted it to the freezing Midwest. Indeed such warm weather really had no place there, but nobody seemed to complain. When I left for break, the trees were already in a fuller blossom than they had been when I visited the campus for the first time in late April last year.

Owing to the high humidity of the Northwest in the winter, the first exhalation I had was in a sense, exhilarating; I saw my breath streak out in a steamy mess from my mouth and just spill all over the surrounding airspace before dissipating. Such a magical feeling.