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Part 37: Home, Sweet Home

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 The day I arrived in Calgary with my parents and Luke, we decided to pitt stop in Banff. My mom was so excited and we had never been before. My feelings of dread about saying goodbye the next day were masked by moodiness and irritability. It's something I still feel guilty about; she wanted to have a good time and I just wanted to leave. It was getting harder and harder to stuff my sadness down. I felt like I was supposed to be thrilled about being in my new home, but I was just so stressed out.  It didn’t help that I couldn’t talk to Brody. While I was travelling to Calgary, he was finishing up his time in Guyana, and in just one week, he would finally be here with me. That same week, though, he would begin his four-day journey back to Canada while I was starting my new job. His mom had invited me over for dinner in the middle of the week, to which I accepted. I had met her about eight months ago (story told in part 33) so it was nice to have a familiar face. I was also movi...
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Part 36: The Days Leading Up To My Departure

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 The time had come. It was the second to last week of September and I was moving out.  My grandpa helped me buy my first car, a classic Honda Civic. I could hardly believe it was mine. I could just get in and drive wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. As I pulled away from the dealership, my grandpa followed behind in his own car. On the freeway, he passed me and gave me a thumbs up. I returned it, beaming, feeling like a real adult in my new car. He sped ahead to catch his exit while I stayed behind, driving more slowly and a little nervously. Just as I began to relax, I noticed a strange, unpleasant smell, the kind you recognize instantly when something is burning that should not be. I glanced down and saw the coolant gauge in the red. Then smoke started rising from under the hood. I pulled off the freeway into a parking lot, my excitement fading as it became clear my car was in trouble. Ethan came to my rescue and my grandpa came to pick the car up. He was going to take i...
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Part 35: Beauty School Dropout

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 The summer of 2022 had such a fun feeling. I was officially preparing for my move to Calgary and Brody's return home in September. The James family had agreed to let me rent out a room in their home, and my grandpa was helping me find my first car.   It was an exciting time of life, but sometimes I would get really sad thinking about how I was moving away from my family. The sadness was just a bit less than the amount of excitement I had about seeing Brody again. We took a trip to Bothell to see family for my mom's birthday, and it is still one of the best weekends of my life to date.  Jill graduated high school in June and went to prom looking so grown up and beautiful We took a trip to Veranda Beach. It was our first one since the pandemic and it was so fun  I was finishing up my Cosmetology and Barbering program and was supposed to graduate in August, so I could get a job hairdressing in Calgary. The program had been full of great highs and lows. The school ...
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Part 34: Tattling Is For Kids

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Remember last year when I saw that doctor that told me that they could remove all of my painful cramping issues with surgery? I was still waiting for a surgery date, and it had been almost a year. One morning, I woke up to a voicemail from the Abbotsford hospital telling me that they had space for me to get my surgery, in two days.  I had been waiting for this moment. All of the pain and unexplained issues, all of the waiting and wondering and it was happening. I would have to take time away from school and work. It was a small procedure, but surgery nonetheless.  It was a day surgery, and Covid had calmed down quite a bit so my mom was able to come in with me. I was starting to get really nervous about having surgery again. The difference between this one and my appendectomy was that I would be home by the end of the day and it wasn't an emergency. The vibes were totally different. I wasn't in active pain and we weren't at risk of anything happening before I could get in. ...
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Part 33: I Want To Marry Your Son, By The Way

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Brody and I hadn't talked for three days, which was the longest we had ever been apart. I had so much I wanted to tell him. I still hadn't told him about how badly Gaston had hurt me, or how badly Hans had hurt me. I wanted him to know since both of those were pretty big things to happen in my life. I hadn't been able to tell him I loved him for three days, it felt like forever. We knew that his new mission president might be strict and not let us talk at all. That would mean we would only be able to talk every once and awhile, and the idea of that made me really sad.  About three days after Brody got to Guyana, I got an email from him. On Mondays, missionaries typically sent out weekly emails to their families and friends. But I got a special email from him that was just sent to me. We had talked about sending each other voice memos instead of written out emails so we could hear each other's voices. Hearing his voice made me cry. I had previously mentioned that I was g...
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Part 32: He Loves Me

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 When I saw Elder Jensen after the chaos in Idaho, it was in the parking lot of a stadium in Abbotsford. We had arranged to say goodbye before he left for Guyana in a few days. Missionaries have to travel in pairs, so he had swindled an easy going Elder to come chaperone us, but was going to give us some space. I liked that Elder Jensen wanted to talk to me in person and not just over text. He wasn't shy to admit to others that he wanted to say goodbye to me and that he cared for me. This Elder that came with him had caught on to what was going on a little while ago. We were at a basketball game, Elder Jensen walked away and the other Elder came over to me and said, "You love him, don't you?" At the time, I kind of just laughed. Love is a strong word, I didn't know how I felt yet but I know that I had been burnt by jerks a few too many times and had my guard up. Since then, there had been too many moments I couldn't ignore. I had fallen in love with him.  The ...
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Part 31: Covid Test: 3 Becca: 0

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 What could the "elephant in the room" mean to him? I mean if you were to ask me, it would be that we obviously have feelings for each other. But for him, it could be that obviously we need to stop being so friendly with each other. He could be waiting to enter the Vancouver airport and tell me that he won't be ready for a relationship for a long time and that I needed to back off. This wouldn't be anything I hadn't heard before. I mean men seemed to run from me as fast as they could, for reasons I didn't understand. But if that were the case, I don't know why he would wait another month and a half to tell me that. He and I had gotten friendly but everything was extremely appropriate, with him being a missionary and all. One night, he told me that the highlight of his day was when he got to see me, which I thought was nice and could be interpreted as a dead giveaway that he liked me more than as a friend, but I still had a massive guard up and knew that he...
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