By: Kaja Antic, Staff Writer
Dear Kaja in 2029,
I hope you remembered to take your meds this morning. If you don’t have to take them anymore, congrats! If not, I hope Zoloft is still treating you well-ish. We just moved out of our childhood home and it’s been . . . an adjustment. I hope you still remember it, or at least remembered to change your address to wherever you live now. Mom’s place was getting too crowded, and being the only sibling who knows how to drive, you moved in with your dad, in the middle-of-nowhere, Langley. I hope you eventually get used to it, right now I’m struggling with how far it is from everything familiar.
The neighbourhood around “the old house” is changing a lot right now. The SkyTrain construction just started, and the traffic makes driving on Fraser Highway hellish. I hope you remember the little things about the old house. How your brother (accidentally) slamming the front door on his way to school served as your alarm during your first two years of university. How our family dog, Harrison, would paw at your door in the morning to greet you or look sadly through the glass when you wouldn’t let him in and share a bite of your food.
I hope you remember your old bedroom. How it looked before you took that trip to Serbia, the bright-pink walls and the metal pendant lamp that you claimed was a fairy cage. It was hanging down so low, mom and dad would always hit their heads on it, until they got rid of it. Remember when you were five: after returning from overseas, you saw your brother’s furniture now taking up half your room and the pink walls painted beige. After seeing the crib in the room next door, you realized then how soon your baby sister would be joining you.
The beige stayed for years, only changing once your presence left its four walls. The switch to your begrudging coexistence with your sister when she took his place at age three, and the big sister dream being realized when you finally got a bunk bed at nine. You had the top bunk, of course. Don’t forget how, at 10, you made forts with your sister, searching for every extra blanket in the house and drafting whole floor plans for the fleece-lined structure. You bring your friends over for the first time at 12, and all five of you crowd the top bunk. Looking back on it, it probably wasn’t the safest thing to do, but seventh-grade gossip was more important anyways. Entering teenage years saw our bed move to the lower bunk, as I was suddenly too tall for staying up top by 14. Unfortunately, that was the tallest we’d grow, unless a miracle occurs in the next five years. Remember all the Christmas light strings you strung together to surround the room in a variety of shades and colours — they brought warmth to the cold beige walls. That was one of most tedious thing to take down before your sister painted over the room you lived in for over a decade.
It’s not just your bedroom(s) that were important. I hope you remember going into mom’s and dad’s room after school one day in March 2020, collapsing on the bed and crying while muttering “I like girls.” Mom was confused, she thought we were just a really good ally. You both cried as you laid there, explaining your years-long inner conflict. At least coming out to your sister a few months later wasn’t as dramatic. A light joke being passed off, leading to the “you’re gay?” question, only for her to inform you that she knew from reading your journal. You chased her from your still-shared room to the living room, talked a bit more, then fell asleep on the couch watching YouTube. I can’t exactly remember what we watched, but I hope you remember the relief of finally being out to some of your family.
The same living room, where you and your brother would take all your stuffed animals and lay them across the top of the couch, a proper audience for a movie night. Shame that tradition died down as you got older. The same room where Christmas mornings were spent, where you met 10-week-old Harrison on his first night home, where you played Just Dance with your siblings on the night that was meant to host your high school grad dance, where you opened your seventh birthday present — a stuffed tiger you creatively named “Tiger.” The same room where you spent one of the last nights living under the same roof as your siblings playing Wii Sports and Mario Party together. You lost every game handedly, but it was a nice way to wrap up your 19- and 15-year-long “living together” streaks.
Remember the basement suite, especially. It fell into disrepair after Baba passed away. You’d come home from school, knock because you always forgot your key, and have Baba come rescue you. Remember the times you’d end up talking with her for hours, about school, your friends, or her upbringing in rural Yugoslavia, and the places she’d travel to once she immigrated to Canada. And of course, the times she’d make you do a fashion show after shopping. I hope you still remember her voice, lovingly mocking your Serbian, or how proud she was of you for continuing school during a pandemic.
Now, you have to travel half an hour to visit “your mom’s place,” a sentence I would have never thought of five years ago. I hope you remember what it was like to live under the same roof as her. All the times you’d annoy her while she worked from home, the times you’d get a take out lunch and watch “anything funny” on the TV, and when you’d keep her company by talking about dinosaurs, cars, or hockey while she cooked. It’s hard right now not having her there constantly. I hope that gets easier with time.
I hope you remember the good times of our “moving-out-era.” It’s not perfect by any means, and honestly feels like everything is constantly falling apart, but there are good moments. Remember walking through your childhood home after the movers had left, all the memories from over the years flooding back. Remember picking up Harrison from the kennel a day later, dropping him off at mom’s and seeing him wander around his new home. Remember strategizing the most effective ways to get to campus, now that the directions from your old neighbourhood were all for naught.
You still have a lot of growing to do, even past these five years. I hope wherever you live now feels like home, or at least as much as it can compared to the old house.
Thank you for doing your best.
Sincerely,
Kaja from 2024
