“To make an end is to make a beginning.” -T.S. Eliot

It’s hard to put in words how I feel. The pain cuts the worst at night, when somehow the open sky pulls me closer to the past and won’t let me fall asleep. Brief, blurry moments strung together make the past ten months seem like some kind of dream, the kind that you wake up and your heart drops because you return to reality, or a lengthy film about somebody else’s life, somewhere else, that you lose yourself in completely, if only for an hour or two.

That was my life. Mine.

I often think of the times when I sat feeling sorry for myself, when I could have been living. Those were the times that I was small and fragile. I don’t look back with regret- those times were necessary for me to accomplish something, to overcome some minuscule demons lurking, and then, I think of the times when I jumped off cliffs and danced with strangers and lived in the moment- and I know that in those moments, I was bigger than I ever dreamed.

Back in my little hometown, I’m back into my tidy cozy routine, hardly leaving the city limits. I’m alone a lot now, and surprisingly, I like it. Silence is better than bull****. When I’m driving through the golden fields alongside the lake, one hand dangling from the open window, and the other on the wheel, hair whipping; I hear a song and I smile, just a little bit.

Little things can carry so many thoughts. I have a faded, generically black dress with rips in the underarms from too much wear from H&M that I bought two summers ago with Clem (my host mom had the same one in grey), on my first exchange, as a naïve 16-year-old. It’s carried me through the first day of senior year (twice), long family Christmas dinners, errand running solo in the 7th in Paris, and sweet too-short sunny days in Colmar parks. It’s been across the Atlantic and back, twice. The dress- it’s not important. What I did in it was.

This isn’t the last you’ll hear from me. I’ll have other adventures, I know, though never any nearly as grand as this. I’ll be in Seattle for university, and after, I dream of seeing every corner of the world that holds a fragment of my heart.

To those that follow: Your dreams are important. Work hard- really hard. Don’t give up, keep going. Know that you are worthy of love, even when those around you tell you that you are not. Put down the phone. Live a little.

It’s all going to be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

au revoir (see you again)

-l