The Road Goes Ever On…
After countless sunsets over beaches that were never the same, after nights spent tracing shifting maps in unchanging stars, after the dewy grass under the hickory trees in our old backyard, after a field in Austria, after a beach along the Mediterranean, after an eager and tear-filled plane ride that stretched in endless trails into darkness, after fearful expectations and homesickness, after the quirky teacher who taught us an awful lot about how to be open-minded, hold on to our values, and learn well (but considerably less about language arts), after the shaky videos of scrawny friends wrestling and laughing and doing handstands, after the ‘graduation’ party when we played card games on the floral carpet and ate cheap pizza and listened to “Dumb Ways to Die” entirely too many times, after the multi-family camping trip when none of us took a bath for a week and it was so blasted windy that Kaleb almost flew away with the tent, after the sandstorm and the drooling camel and the strong mint tea, after the man whose shining smile pulled us into his shop to marvel at his stunning carpets and infallibly friendly words and more mint tea, after the days at our friend’s farm, chatting about the wide-eyed calf who would be her wedding meal and watching the boys jump off brown, muddy banks into brown, muddy river and savoring the best mint tea of all, after my adorable dimple-cheeked little brother grew into a stretched-out, gangly teen, after days and nights and whole years desperately trying to impress my teachers and my parents and my friends, after scrambling to turn back the clock and not grow too fast and keep things the way they were, after watching helplessly as one close friend left with her whole family, after sharing life and acceptance and brace-filled awkward years with the closest friend I ever had, after helping that new best friend pack up and lug trails of heavy suitcases into the airport for the last time, after the horrifying, irrevocable news coming in shaking words that fell out of my mother’s lips that night, after contentment, after hurt, after changing despite my best efforts to the contrary… I am the one who is leaving.