Sitting in the airplane on my way to Nairobi, I think about the life I once had, my recollection of it fading like contrails in the dark blue.

“Can I get you something to drink?” the flight attendant asks me. A Coke sounds nice. I take a sip and find myself back in a memory, one that is so distant now but still so dear. There I am, with my friends, eating salads and drinking Cokes, leaving the restaurant and running around the pool, talking about school, talking about boys.

“I love your ring,” the flight attendant says with a smile. Her voice, a reminder of where I am. The memory is gone and I am back in row fourteen, window seat. I smile back and look out at the dark sky thinking about how quickly everything changes and wishing I could go back and force myself to enjoy it all just a little bit more. I look down at my ring, the one I got in Victoria on my last trip to Canada. I think about how I could never have gone to Victoria if my life hadn’t been derailed, with school and my social life as collateral damage. My mind automatically separates my experiences into then and now. Before my home country became too dangerous to live in and after. My old life and this new transitory, bewildering, unstable, and lucky one.

I look over at my mum, half asleep listening to Dido, and begin telling her about my summer in Salt Spring, British Columbia, about how my time there has become a fundamental piece of who I am. My sister and I arrived on the island on the 18th of May, our third month away from home. I would rather have been anywhere else. Having to leave my home for my own safety, traveling from place to place, Kigali to New York, Port Hope to Nairobi, Kampala to Dakar, home was all I could think about. The last thing I wanted to do was sleep in yet another relative’s guest bedroom, living out of a suitcase — mostly full of books — that could barely close. We stepped off the ferry and mum’s cousin stood on the dock waving at us with her partner and their dog. The scene caused the chorus from “Catch a Wave” by The Beach Boys to play in my head on repeat, a paradox of the way I am feeling. Where am I? Who are these people and why am I here?

To be fair, this trip had been planned months in advance and I had been looking forward to it. That is, before Salt Spring became my place of refuge. Being there was bittersweet. Bitter because mum and dad were back home, and sweet because my sister and I got to bond with our second cousin, now our favorite person. Is it possible to feel happy and sad at the same time? If it is, that is the only way to describe how I was feeling. Everything I had always wanted and had never been able to have living in Haiti — freedom, safety, a part-time job — I suddenly got. But instead of filling the proverbial void, they widened it. Every little thing I did felt like a betrayal, like I was somehow insulting my old life, laughing and pointing at it. Every time I got paid, I thought about all the people in Haiti who weren’t going to be able to feed themselves and their families that day, of the people I love the most being trapped behind iron bars in their homes, the sound of gunshots, all too familiar, fading into the background. I thought about all the pocket money I used to save up to buy books and other useless trinkets that I saw as little treasures, wondering where that version of myself went.

When did I lose my innocence? When did the world stop being magical and become terrifying? I have tried to answer this constant stream of questions by picking apart specific events, milestones, tragedies, without ever achieving a concrete, satisfying answer, because it does not exist. I search for meaning in the things I find most confusing and realize that this thing I am looking for, trying so hard to understand and describe, is so abstract that it cannot be verbalized. To ask why certain things are the way they are is to assume that there is one reason, that we all exist on earth to follow a preordained path and fulfill some kind of destiny. But what if one person’s destiny is to suffer and another’s is to prosper? Does that mean that one is less deserving of happiness than the other?

What I have come to realize is that life represents a series of challenges. Our entire existence is determined by how we react to the cards we are dealt and what lessons we take away from our circumstances. A person who grew up in suburbia with two parents and a French bulldog shielded from harm by their white picket fence can find themselves just as confused in the end as someone who lives a tumultuous life, forced to go from place to place in search of safety, forgetting what home is supposed to look like. This does not make one’s experiences more valuable than the other, because there is no value in what cannot be conceptualized. The rudimentary purpose of life that I have fabricated for myself is to take everything in stride and not dwell on the things I know can never be retrieved. All I can do with the challenges I face is learn from them in hope of maximizing what little time I have before I pack up my things and watch as my childhood fades into the rearview mirror.