A Barefoot Life

“Remember those summers, when we would all backpack to the Yosemite park, just the two of us, dad and mom?” Bianca spoke to her iPhone screen, taking occasional sips from her cup of coffee. Brian could not agree more, his always-curious eyes now seeming to have stopped searching the way it always did.
For Bianca, the 28-year-old financial advisor, it was a 10-minute break between her sessions on one of the most anticipated M&As of the season. But something about the crema layered over her dark-tan espresso took her on a time travel - to a time so far away, where life was best lived outdoors - barefoot, in baggy shorts and most often, skinny dipping at the Devil’s bathtub after a long hike up the national park.
“Yeah, how do I forget that?! Dad would brew us a fresh mug of coffee following one of those treks and we would all laugh over the way you wildly climbed up the trail, hopping and kicking at boulders as you went,” the 25-year-old barista and fine arts graduate chuckled, not wanting his manager to find him on his phone, yet again, mapping out the next travel plan.
Somewhere between childhood and adulting, life’s compass began pointing at a direction neither of them ever hoped to tread. And somehow, they followed it without resistance. From a family of four to a family of two, their trail was filled with bigger boulders, ones that Bianca or Brian could not kick away.
The coffee had turned cold, and she hadn’t noticed the minutes tick by. Like cairns guiding a trail, these hardly-visited childhood memories were guiding Bianca on to something. But not knowing what it was, the perennial juxtaposition of facts and fantasy, made her scream a little inside.
“Why am I being reminded of a past so beautiful yet elusive at this moment in my life? Is there more to life than these glass cubicles, sugar-coated egos and sapping competition?”
She fully knew that a whole another galaxy awaited her outside, one where a family of four had once sat around campfires, shared gratitude and smiled at the milky way. She knew life was better spent in baggy shorts, and not skirted suits or stilettos. She knew, god knows she knew, her feet longed for the coolness of grass on bare skin, her body, the warmth of sunlight and her soul, the rush that came with not knowing what lay ahead. But knowing was one, acknowledging, another.
The coffee had turned ice-cold and the crema, almost disappeared. She looked around once again - poker-faced deliberations, ignored calls and text messages, unresolved, perpetual financial quandaries. Bianca hankered for another shot of espresso before the meeting. And so she took off to the place where she had once tasted the best coffee, under a vast, shimmering sky, barefoot, wild and full of love.