A quarter of life review

To fresh memories where the ocean meets land on the other side of the Northern Hemisphere. To bikinis and surfboards, sunsets and turquoise water. To cocktails and poke bowls, acaí and embracing vegetarianism. To endless summer that never feels that way. To palm trees and sun burns, to volcanoes and hikes, and learning the star constellations on cloudless nights.To lush greens and deep blues, to high hopes and sad truths. To quenching my thirst for wanderlust and adventure on paradisiac islands, golden coasts and on continents down-under that run faster than our clocks.

To feeling home everywhere I go, and to actually going home after what felt like ages ago. To all the old friends that embraced me with the same love and excitement on their face, making me feel like I never left in the first place. To new forged friendships, some fleeting, some strong and some bound to be forever. To all the beautiful souls I met in the past years, to those reunions I ventured for on long plane rides that got canceled, made me cry but also fly high. To all the unexpected things that happened and those I expected to finally happen. To those nights I can’t remember with people I’ll never forget.

To love stories new and old, summer flings and love affairs and lots of dates in magical places. Intense, rewarding, heart-breaking, unfulfilling, frustrating, innocent, wild. Even if some I’ll definitely try to forget, I will remember their charm and their poise, their anecdotes and foreign accents, their scratchy beards that tickled against my red cheeks. I will remember their blue eyes and thick lashes and how they made my heart beat faster and faster until it didn’t.

To being self-partnered and enjoying my own company. To being myself, the one and only constant companion of my life. To finding me and growing with every experience, encounter, adventure and mistake. To questioning my sanity every once in a while as I learn to balance adulthood and life.To finding peace in poetry and prose, wisdom in people I know and in those that I don’t. Sometimes I still don’t know who I am and most of the time I don’t know where I stand, but that’s okay. I am learning and taking it all in, and I know I’ll thrive because I am alive and becoming.

To finishing my university degrees and passing with merit in ‘endurance and perseverance’, to simultaneously crying and feeling like I’m on top of the world. To acknowledging the harsh reality that even though I’m qualified and smart in mind and paper, the 50 job applications and countless interviews suggest another nature and leave me feeling disappointed and not so much on top of the world anymore. I get it; expectation management is also a good skill to learn.

And finally, to my family and our hearts living off the same connections, resulting in deep affections while we start spreading our wings in different directions. To an end of an era of living together with my best friends. Here’s to love, laughter, chances and changes, here’s to plenty and to navigating my twenties.