Monarch Campground, Yoho National Park — Across from our campground a mountain rises straight off the valley floor, still holding patches of snow in June. At its base Kicking Horse River, from glacial origins, runs pale blue and restless, carrying meltwater down from somewhere I can’t see. In the evening light I keep looking back and forth between them. The mountain looks permanent, ancient, unmoving, and the river is nothing but movement. You’d think it was obvious which one lasts.
My scientist husband confirms geology says otherwise. Given enough time the river carves valleys, shifts its banks, moves stone. The mountain changes too. It just changes more slowly than we can stand around to watch.
I’ve been thinking about that this week, maybe because I’ve reached the age where you can’t help looking back and wondering about the lives that didn’t happen. Not with regret, exactly. More like curiosity.
There’s a version of me who stayed in the seminary, who got ordained, who spends his Sundays preaching and celebrating Mass, growing older inside the rhythms of the Church. A version who never left the Philippines, who stayed close to family and built a life in the place where he was born. A version who never came out, who learned to live with the silence, or told himself he had. A version who never became a writer, who filled notebooks and never sent any of it out, who never felt the strange joy and terror of being read by a stranger.
Sometimes we talk about these alternate lives as failures of courage or accidents of fate, as though one life wins and the rest disappear. I’m not convinced that’s true anymore.
When I think about the priest I almost became, I don’t see a stranger. I see him everywhere: in how much I love language, in my pull toward ritual, in the habit of digging for meaning under the surface of things. The journalist I used to be is in the questions I still ask. The immigrant is in the way I’m always translating one world into another. The kid from a conservative Catholic family is in the arguments I’m still having with faith and belonging.
The lives we don’t live aren’t really abandoned. They settle into the sediment under the life we do.
Looking at the river and the mountain, I think identity isn’t a monument so much as a process. When I was younger, I imagined adulthood as an arrival, that one day I’d simply become the person I was meant to be. Instead, I’ve spent most of my life becoming and unbecoming, leaving and coming back, holding on and letting go. The self gathers tributaries. It changes course. It carries silt from every place it’s run through.
I can feel the current still working. This past year alone held endings I didn’t see coming and openings I couldn’t have predicted: another work layoff, my mother’s death, a national literary award, an offer for the memoir that started as blog in 2013, an attempt to understand my own life. Show me this version of myself twenty years ago and I doubt I’d have recognized him. And yet he holds all the others, the seminarian, the immigrant, the reporter, the man still working out where he belongs. They’re all here, moving in the same current.
The light goes out of the valley. The mountain stays where it’s always been. The river keeps moving. I watch them both for a while before I head back to our trailer.
This is our first camping trip without our beloved little Shih Tzu, Marley.
Renato Gandia 