/arrival/

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. –C.S. Lewis

There are things that bring you comfort. The familiar weight of your backpack hanging from your shoulders. The peppermint scent of Dr. Bronner’s soap. Curled pages of poetry that have kept you company around the globe. These are the things that you haul from place to place. These are the things that help you feel like you when the snow globe world has shaken once more and the particles have settled.

Here’s how it goes: You pack your bags thoughtlessly, and then you drive. Roads unspool like ribbon. Music holds you tight. In Montana you listened to Harry Styles on repeat as you drove into plumes of smoke, your hand outstretched beyond the window bobbing up&down up&down in the hazy air. The wildfires were calling you home, and you listened. You burned.

You wear the same three rings, the same five necklaces, the same four pairs of wool socks. You feel like a liar when you fill in your parents’ address on your I-9 form. You are doing your best to call this body home.

After your parents dropped you off as a freshman in college, you threw on a sundress, filled your backpack with notebooks and pens, and ran outside into the arms of the city. I think I’m lost, you texted your then-boyfriend as a nature trail ended at a row of dilapidated houses, beer cans and cigarette butts posing as lawn ornaments. You ignored your boyfriend’s concern and continued onward.

There is so much world to see.

Your nose was pressed against the car window as you wound through the foothills of the Himalaya for the first time, eager smudges on the glass. Bodies swung like pendulums around the curves, colliding in the backseat. You drove higher. Your body thrummed. The mountains felt endless, and your heart burst with sunshine and everything inside of you felt lighter and more radiant than it had a heartbeat ago.

There’s a restlessness that inhabits your bones, that invites you onward, pushes you to new places, into the arms of new people. You don’t fight it. Not anymore.

But that wasn’t always true. There was a time when all you wanted was to stay, when forever felt like something to strive toward. But those days are over, those memories  stitched up and haphazardly healed, and stability is no longer something you dream of.

You wander.
You burn.
You are too much for a single person to hold.

You are in Ohio now. You drink chamomile tea, and listen to conspiracy theories, and you wonder if anyone is thinking of you in that very second, if you’re more alive, more cherished in memory. You sit in a coffee shop in New Philadelphia and remember sitting in a similar one in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where the barista complimented your necklace and then fled to the bathroom to vomit. You loved that place.

Someone mentions the phrase “twin flame,” and you realize how much you’ve left behind, and how you don’t regret any of it.

There is so much world to see.