This Time Around

Yesterday I spent some time contemplating what it would have been like to stay in Texas. Joshua and I both really miss my family a lot and eventually had to just stop talking about it yesterday in order to enjoy the trip. We are having a fantastic time now, but the feeling lingers that different paths are always available to us. We can make bad choices, good choices, great choices. And sometimes, it really is just a choice. What will you do with your life? Where will you go? What are your goals? Someone said something the night before we left that made me feel guilty about leaving and I had to wonder if the whole thing was a giant gesture of selfishness. Confessing this to my brother, I almost needed a release. He very calmly observed, “You’ve done this before. It’s where you’re supposed to go and you know that.” The heavy implication was the reality I have known in my heart since I was a child: I don’t belong in Texas. I just don’t. As big and wide as that sky is, it is somehow not big enough. And that’s okay. Choosing to move 1,800 miles away (and maybe eventually across an ocean) is not the choice to abandon relationships there. It is simply a selection of paths and this one carries me further away. It rips my heart out because I absolutely need those souls in my life and the more frequently, the better. But I also do not want to limit myself to a radius. The idea that the average person lives within a fifty mile radius where they are born is completely disconcerting and suffocating to me. Sometimes better opportunities lie outside of our radius but we feel safer within that space. (I acknowledge that sometimes the opportunities are not better or that the decision to stay is not always personal security, but those are two things that I am not willing to risk). So here I am. On this path. And today the music and lyrics of IO sang over me a proclamation…

This time around... You can be anyone...

Residing in the Comma

Seven days remaining.

Thursday through Sunday were spent sorting, packing, and cleaning our entire apartment. Thanks to some last minute help we were actually out by 10:30 (of course not to bed until midnight). I am still sore from all that work, but I am glad it is done. While we did actually get out, we are not finished with our list. Lately, I've been feeling pretty out of it and it is definitely due to lack of sleep. I am torn between rest and my to-do list, knowing neither can be satisfied with this week's schedule of working, trying to schedule time with friends, hanging out with my family, plus all of the other things bound to arise like laundry, repacking, planning, etc.

The busy-ness (busyness, business, bizness) has continued to be my shelter from that feeling of leaving... again. It is an emotionally tense place to live, but I have not found another solution. I just need time to slow down (or maybe speed up?). I want it to be over, I want it to never come. I want to drive away, I want to stay forever. I have so much to do, I just want to relax. I reside in that comma.

New discoveries:

• I find that I have to psyche myself up for infinite moments. Like, driving down the road is just a commute unless you turn on your favorite music, light up, and roll down the windows even though it is raining. Suddenly something routine becomes rejuvenating.
• Ben and Jerry's "Everything But The..." is my new favorite comfort food.
• I am finding that I like to be "necessary". Self-esteem issue? Maybe. I'm working on it.
• Sometimes friendship grow with change and sometimes they fade. Mostly though, relationship change with change. The dynamic that worked in the past may not continue, but it can still be beautiful.

The Hardest Thing About Leaving

We are moving forward. Days are dragging on, but somehow weeks are flying by. We are down to eighteen days remaining. Eighteen. I just cannot believe how close it is.

It has been an overwhelming few months, but I am starting to see the finish lines to what has been eating my time, energy, and attention. Knowing that there are reasonable chunks of tasks that can be completed and will be coming to a close brings a lot of peace of mind. Monday signals the end of my school year. The following Sunday is the Official Move Out Day. The weekend after that is my last day of work at GBBC and Hunter's graduation. And two days later, we're leaving.

Just like that. Leaving.

My emotions are all over the place but my busyness has helped me stay distracted from that topsy-turvy nervousness and the sadness at leaving my family behind again. Family is the hardest group of people to stay with and the hardest people to leave. My sight is becoming blurry with stinging, salty tears as I type this, particularly thinking of leaving my siblings behind because as we grow up, we change so much and so quickly. The year I was gone it seemed that all of them became different people. I just do not know how to miss those moments in their lives and be okay with it.

I'm talking about the moments that make you who you are: when you tell a bad decision no, or say yes to a mistake and grow from it, or have the best night laughing with friends (the kind you remember for always), or any number of those times when you feel "infinite" and it becomes what molds your memories. So many people do not get to love their siblings the way I love mine. When I say I would die for them, there is no hesitation in my heart that I would give every last thing I have to save them, help them, grow them. Each is such a unique person with incredible talent, beauty, and destiny. And if you've met them even once, even briefly, you know that too. How do I just get in a car and drive away? How do I move forward with my life, knowing that they are moving forward with theirs and it might not be in a parallel direction anymore?

As long as I have known these four incredible people, we have all been moving in the same direction: up. We were growing up, from one grade to the next, from single digits to double digits, middle school to high school, up clothes sizes... just up. But I hit it first: that place where things are not moving "up" so much as across. Getting older is leveling out just a bit and I am making choices for my life that move me out and forward. Hunter is beginning to do the same and now every other year, so will each of the others. So as we move out and forward, can we still be together? Can we still be connected? Can we avoid the awkward quiet and fumbling for conversation that comes between normal friends after extended time apart? Can we still be involved and interact without having that deathly distance kill the intimate camaraderie that is so unexplainable and so rare? I hope so. God, with all my heart, I hope so. Because these are the people I love the most and I know my life would fade so quickly and lose so much color if something were to tear us apart.

There it is. That's the hardest thing about leaving. I feel like I am abandoning them and it's hard not to hate myself for it. It's not comforting to be told that it will "all be okay", that I have to go my own direction because it's "natural" and "healthy," that our relationships will be fine, etcetera etcetera. I'm supposed to be here. I'm their older sister who has done her very best to love them, protect them, and encourage them amidst her own chaotic learning. I have made mistakes, but I do not love them any less or want to be away from them anymore.

I will be okay. I know I will because I have been before. But today it just hit me and my independence tastes more bitter than sweet through these thoughts.

{So if any of you darlings read this, I love you. I love you so very much, with all my heart, and I always will. I'm here for you no matter what, no matter when. Forever. -Your Sister}