LOST AND FOUND

I remember something from my World Scout Jamboree experience. It wasn’t a particularly fond memory, but when I look back at it, part of me can’t help but laugh. It was the day before all the buses would begin evacuating us for the heat wave, and probably the most traumatic experience my sister had ever lived down with me, except when she fell face-first onto the concrete. No, this day we walked for about two hours, aimlessly, while the sun was hot and beating down our backs, and sweat dripped from our foreheads like two endless mini-waterfalls.

We went back and forth. This way. That way. No, this way. I’m pretty sure it was that way. I was the one with the map, and ironically, my sister had a better idea of where we were supposed to go. At that moment, the realization hit me. We were potentially lost, in the middle of a World Scout Jamboree camp. A big camp. In Saemangeum, Korea. Her phone was almost dead, so I was never more grateful that my phone still worked. We called our Unit Leader two times, sent locations two times, and when we finally found somewhere we recognized–the trail back to our campsite–I could only now imagine that fuming anger boiling up inside her.

I should have listened to her in the first place when she said,

“We passed that sign when going here.”

CREW 14

I see the number 14 everywhere. On my graded papers, my keyboard, my iPhone keyboard, my battery percentage, and last year’s birthday. It’s stuck in my vision, heart and mind. But 14 signifies something much, much bigger for me than just a number. Because my home during the 2023 World Scout Jamboree–Saemangeum, South Korea–was my Crew. Crew 14, our unit number.

In a huge, unimaginably humungous crowd of thousands and thousands of scouts around the globe, Crew 14 was, and still is my Jamboree home. They were my family, my peas in a large fat pod. We looked out for each other, especially when one of them got sick, we stayed by his side in the daunting, hot, and humid lava-like weather. And it was funny, remembering how I desperately wanted nothing more than to go home on my first few days, and when I was going home, I didn’t want to leave. I never wanted to leave my new crew family.

The realization hit me once we had our final day, with nearly everyone pulling all-nighters and crying and sobbing tears, hugging each other tightly. One, two, then three, and more scouts began to exit for their plane time. I watched numbly as they left, and soon it was me and my Southern California crew group to leave. It was inevitable, the goodbyes. We had to go back somewhere. Back where we started, until we could reunite in Poland.

4 more years.

Just 4.

THE FLICKERING CANDLE

My family has recently bought a new set of fresh candles to put on our kitchen counter. The one we used was a nice green. Evergreen. I had forgotten the name, but something rings close to Evergreen Forest. I think. If I leaned close enough, I could smell the faint scent of outside. I am brought back outside, in a damp forest. Tall trees loomed over me and gray clouds cascaded the sky. Birds chirp and tweet small songs, and dew drops drip drip drip, off of pine leaves of those tall tall trees.

Candles need to breathe. They die without air, like humans. The lid is placed over it, and then, the forest is flickering rapidly. Black on gray, black on green. It’s like standing in a big room, except someone is annoying you by repeatedly flicking the light switch on and off. Once, everything is dark into nothingness, and I open your eyes. That round glass lid killed the candle, and what remains is smoke flowing up to the ceiling. Up. Up. Up.

COLD WATER

The weather was not ideal to jump in a pool and swim. How many people do you see every day, swimming, while it is raining and cloudy and beyond freezing outside? Not a lot, no. Not. Why are you doing this, old me asked? Why jump in the pool when the weather is only 54 degrees? Because it’s what I do, I say to the young, inexperienced me in my head. I jump into the cold water and I swim and swim and swim. I can’t stop, I need to reach the end.

Swimming when I was little is entirely different than swimming in a high school team. There is endurance, strength, and commitment. Every single day. It is fun, it is pressuring. After practice, someone meets me in my sleep, inside my nonchalant dreams. Do you ever wish something could happen so you could swim faster, so you can be a fish and move through the waters like smooth silk on a clothesline. So the cold water doesn’t make your body stiff, so no matter the weather, you are always confident in every stroke. And you will make the league finals, like last year when you were so unimaginably close to making it for the backstroke finals.

It is only a dream. Reality takes longer to improve, I assume. Reality is cold water splashing over me, telling me I will get better. There is no date.

HEADSPACE

Head in the sky. Head above the clouds. Somewhere, there, is where the quiet greets me with warm loving arms. But it’s not the sky of the earth my head is in, no. It’s my own mind, my own space. My comfort zone inside my head, where I wish things the way they are. Blissful silence, calming colors of gray and sage and leafy shades. Yes, I think. A planty headspace for all my fears and worries. Maybe a potted plant there in the corner, and one small one hanging from the walls. Trees, small and medium and big. Palm trees. Trees with raindrops dripping from the delicate, fresh leaves. A grassy floor, a box filled with the sound of soft singing birds and gentle wind. Yes. My eyes close, and I breathe in deeply. Brown pupils open after what seems like a millennium. Everything is where they should be.