Bursting into life

There was a wonderful moment today when I was driving back to the park after an impromptu trip out for coffee. The sun was shining, the rain had dried up, I was warm for the first time in days, and I was alone.

As I squinted to avoid being blinded by what I considered to be an oddly bright sun, parts of me were there. They were back there, squashed in the back of what was probably the world's most humid minivan, driving through the Croatian countryside, weary from what had been a brilliant week. It had been brilliant, but as I sat in the back of that stuffy tin can on wheels, I realised it had both broken me and pieced me back together. 


Of course, in reality I was just driving along what I can only describe as a dual carriageway that wasn't, but in my head I was somewhere so much bigger. My head was full of memories, memories that are usually locked away in the little compartment I like to call 'Hrvatska'. But, with every piece of reality that found its way into my daydreaming and reminiscing, I found a dozen more memories to mask it. 


Right, roundabout has successfully been completed, we can tick that off the to do list for this journey and go back to sitting in a minivan feeling broken...

So, yes, we're in the minivan. Chasing Cars by Snow Patrol is building, its volume increasing. We're all lined up in two rows singing too, and Margaret is still asleep in the front, which does not go unnoticed (we are secretly glad of the break). My mind races through the week we've just experienced. One minute, I'm despairing on the coach to Novigrad as the group bicker and make a point of throwing the shopping list up and down the seats as if it's going to explode. Lesson 1: you'll often find that nobody is willing to be responsible, not even for a piece of paper and a pen. 

The next minute, Jacob and I are somehow hurtling towards Jemma and Catherine, our paddles somehow contradicting the movements we believed could be described as ''paddling backwards''. We hit them. It's a dull thud, plastic hitting plastic and then less than a second of silence. We've gone under. And it's on top of us. Parts of me are angrily wondering why I'd bothered to imagine that kayaking could ever end well, other parts are really enjoying it panicking. The overriding thought inside my head is simply "you cannot drown, that's not going to go down well". Somehow, I find my way back into the kayak, as does Jacob. And then a minute later some of the boys manage to knock us off what was really only a 'very small waterfall', but when you've just nearly drowned is obviously just a curse. By now, though, nervous laughter has kicked in and I look mental. Great, I'm standing on a rock in Croatia while I laugh at the fact that we're all so incompetent that we can't manage to stay afloat for more than a minute. Lessons 2 and 3: never go kayaking, never confront your irrational fear of being underwater in front of a teacher who will get drunk and present you with an award for ''amusing the whole group when you fell out of that kayak''.

But, mainly, in my dream-like state, I was just back in that minivan, that krvavi minivan, convincing myself that if I didn't get eaten alive by ants, I'd certainly die of heat exhaustion while listening to Margaret repeat ''when the going gets tough..." But you know what? I reckon I left a bit of me in that minivan. Whenever the sun is out, I'm instantly back there. We're singing as loudly as possible while our driver (a lovely young Croatian woman whose name I never learnt) smiles in the rear-view mirror and turns the radio up, even though we're stuck in Trogir traffic and all of the windows are down. 


That moment is a moment I would relive everyday if I could. There, the atmosphere was, simply, magical. Because, you see, we had started out at the back of a coach, tired and weary after an airport mishap and about to murder one another over whether or not tomato soup truly was a necessity for our week in the Croatian wilderness. We had nearly drowned each other in the middle of a river that was, quite frankly, hours away from anything resembling a hospital. We had embarrassed ourselves, we had injured places we didn't know existed, everybody else seemed to have been bitten (but not lucky me), our teachers had embarrassed us by getting drunk in a campsite bar, we had each experienced something that resembled a nervous breakdown in a mini-supermarket over the budget, and we had hated the world beyond any hate we had known to exist. But, and this is the big one, we had lived. We had gathered around the campfire, sharpened twigs, toasted marshmallows. We had gathered by the water and laughed until our sides ached at a rather enthusiastic lady dancing wildly for hours. We had rushed down a mountain to get help for team members who were ill and we had spoken vividly about how much we all loved each other. Lesson 4, the important one: no matter how bad you feel, how embarrassed you are, how much you hate someone or something, how helpless you feel, teamwork will always make it better. In our case, it wasn't better, it turned into something beautiful. 


And there I was, driving back to college, grinning to myself from behind the steering wheel like my invisible friend had just told a really good joke. Embarrassing, I thought, but not as embarrassing as falling out of a kayak in the Croatian countryside. And certainly not as embarrassing as being awarded for it. 

Besos ♥
Rachel