Sleepless nights and dark caves. – By @elisaczerwenka
By Elisa Czerwenka
Sleepless nights and
dark caves.
Saturday morning, I woke up and knew this was a day to go outside.
After Ellie and I had hustled for a full week and slept enough hours for half of it, all I wanted was to leave my house.
So my boyfriend and I went on a walk, just the same old walk I had been going with my parents all my life. Damn was it beautiful. Not only because of the beauty of nature but because of its nostalgia.
When I was younger, we would walk this way every time we visited my grandpa’s grave. I never got to meet him, but I was always fascinated by the visit to the cemetery. My dad would go quiet for a while. Then he would explain that he was talking to his dad. As a child, I was fascinated and drawn to the calm power of connecting with someone who’s long gone. This was when I learned what remembering a loved one means.
Alongside the flower fields, I would always walk with my best friend Alice and her dog Ally. We would try to teach Ally how to jump over the fences, by lifting each piece of wood just a bit higher each time. She really tried. And she did well. So we destroyed the fencing even more.
We did this for about a week before the farmer kicked us off his land.
This was when I learned that even a flower field belongs to someone.
When we couldn’t teach Ally fence techniques anymore, we decided to explore the surrounding land. Hand-in-hand, both wearing fabulous pairs of willies, we turned every stone upside down. The deeper into the forest we got, the more things we found. Dead animals, lost jewellery, treasures of all sorts. But the biggest was yet to be found. When we saw a darkened entrance, we got scared. It looked so natural, yet manmade, so our first thought was: What if someone lives in this? We overcame our fear by lighting our sony Ericsson phone flashlight and stumbling inside what seemed to be a small cave. The little stream flowing out of it turned out to be deeper then we thought. Now soaking wet, in ice-cold water, we could hear the loud noise of water crashing down. There it was. A waterfall, coming down from a hole in the middle of the cave. It was beautiful. This was when I learned that exploration leads to discovery.
When I showed my boyfriend these places, all my memories came back. After a tough week at SCA, this is what I needed to recharge. Nature and a big dose of nostalgia.
