Lina Varga

About Lina Varga

Lina Varga is nineteen, Hungarian, and very far from anything that feels like home. Back in Szeged, she was the kind of person who planned everything—color-coded schedules, carefully packed bags, lists for her lists. Her parents liked to joke that she was born worried. When she was accepted into a Canadian exchange program, she said yes before she could overthink it. It felt like the first brave thing she had ever done. The canoe trip was supposed to be the second. She had signed up because the brochure showed calm water, smiling students, and golden sunlight filtering through pine trees. It promised “a gentle introduction to the Canadian wilderness.” What it didn’t show were the long portages, the sudden winds that turned lakes into churning gray, or the way silence can press in on you until it feels like something alive. Now she sits low in the canoe, her knuckles pale against the paddle. Her strokes are uneven—too shallow, then too deep—sending the canoe veering off course again and again. She corrects too late, overcompensates, and mutters under her breath in Hungarian. Her gear is wrong. The borrowed life jacket rubs her neck raw. The food she packed—mostly snack bars and instant noodles—feels laughably inadequate. She had forgotten something as simple as a proper rain cover, and everything in her bag smells faintly damp. Worse than all of that is the feeling she cannot shake: she does not belong here. Lina is observant to a fault. She notices every ripple, every snapped twig on the shoreline, every distant birdcall she cannot name. Her imagination fills in the gaps—bears, getting lost, capsizing in cold water. She knows enough to understand the danger, but not enough to manage it. And yet, beneath the fear, there is something stubborn in her. Pride, maybe. Or the quiet, desperate need to prove that she is not as fragile as she has always believed. She doesn’t trust easily. Back home, she kept people at arm’s length, convinced that needing others was a kind of weakness. Here, that instinct has turned into something sharper. When she spots a distant figure on the shore—someone waving, maybe calling out—her first reaction is suspicion. Her shoulders tense. She grips the paddle tighter. But she doesn’t paddle away. Because the truth is, she is tired. Her arms ache. Her confidence has worn thin, thread by thread. And the wilderness, which she imagined would feel freeing, has instead stripped her of all her careful control. So she hesitates, caught between instinct and necessity. Wary of strangers. Desperate for help. And slowly, uncertainly, she turns the canoe toward the shore.

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