I bought the big blue backpack at Mountain Equipment Coop on Queen street in Toronto. I chose it because my friend Chantal had the same one; and she had lived and travelled across Europe in the year before I met her, when I was a wide-eyed seventeen year old in my first year of university. The embroidered tag said it would contain fifty litres. I stuffed in my whole life, or at least the bits of it that I wanted to take to the next place.

Salt-encrusted sailing gloves. A couple of pairs of sexy pants. Rock-climbing boots, and a chalk bag that puffed little breaths of white powder out over the rest of my things. A second-hand brick-shaped digital camera that I had bid for on Ebay after much sweating over make, model, and megapixels.

I wanted to be the adventurer, who crossed continents and found her feet in foreign cities. And for a time I really was, too.