In Another Life…

Oak + Fort sweater (c/o) (similar)
Oak + Fort turtleneck (c/o) (similar)
Aldo boots (similar)
Oak + Fort skirt (c/o) (similar)
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Saint-Boniface Cathedral – Winnipeg, Manitoba

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future lately. Not about next week or next month – I expect they will be a lot more of the same – but about what comes after all of this is over. In April, it felt like the future didn’t exist at all. I know now that it does, that although the worst is not yet over, there is a vaccine coming and something like an end in (very distant) sight. But I wonder what that future will look like, given all that’s changed this year.

In another life, I jetted across the country every other week for meetings. I planned vacations around the best travel seasons. It was an English project in twelfth grade that made me realise that, more than anything, what I wanted to do with my life was see the world and write about it. I built a career that allowed me to fund that dream in increasing style year after year, crossing international borders en route to discovery almost every other month. And I built a space, in Coco & Vera, that served as a home for all the writing I did about those adventures, all the photos of what I wore while I took them.

In another life, I expected this year would be no different. I had visions of a tour of Spain, dreams of El Greco paintings and sunny days lounging beneath palm trees. But after our trip to Chicago in February, everything changed. At this point, including a location with my photos seems entirely futile – it’s Winnipeg, always Winnipeg. There is only so much I can do to dress up the city I grew up in, a city well past its prime that is known, most notably, as an affordable place to live. The fact that it never changes is almost part of its charm, but the fact remains that this is a place to call home, not a destination. It’s a place to fly away from, not a place to land.

But it’s home for now. Home for the foreseeable future. And I wonder how much that will change even after this storm passes. Will airlines still be able to operate? And if they can, will the cost of a flight be beyond my budget? When I arrive at my destination, will hotels and restaurants still be open? Or will the economic devastation outlast everything else?

I don’t know. No one does. What I do know is that I am a travel writer with very little to write about, questionning the future of my chosen vocation. In another life, I thought I could go on forever, exploring and writing and exploring more. The work, I was sure, would never end – the world was so vast, with so much to offer, I would never finish seeing it all no matter how hard I tried, and that was the point. I probably should have known it was possible that something else could put an end to my globetrottering, but it never once occurred to me. In my mind, I had wings – nothing could hold me back, nothing could keep me still.

I know better now.

What I don’t know is what happens when you lose the thing that made up most of your life. Do you wait, maybe in vain, in the hopes that it comes back? Or do you try to find a way to move on?

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