Tradition

It, at one point in time at least, was a tradition of ours; Saturday movie night. Finn and I since we had acquired the attention span to sit through a whole movie would pop a huge bowl full of popcorn and gather up as many blankets as our little arms could carry and plant ourselves in from of the television and watch a movie we’d never before seen. The venue would change every one in a while. Sometimes it would be at my house, other times at his. First we’d be in either of our bedrooms, as we could barely keep out eyes open after nine o’clock. Then years later it moved to the living room, much more convenient due to its proximity to the kitchen for midnight snacks. Though we would still venture upstairs simply because beds were much more comfortable for sleeping than floors and couches, plus the ability to close the door made it much easier to whisper secrets in the dark which out our mothers’ prying ears. Some things never changed though. We’d laugh hysterically, gorge ourselves with any kind of junk food we could find, but no matter how much sugar found its way into our system, we would pass out a few hours later amidst our fort of blankets and wake up for church in the morning.
When we turned sixteen we were told things needed to changed. My father wished to do away with the whole tradition altogether. Suddenly, in that old man’s mind, Finn went from the annoying little gender neutral kid new door who happened to be his daughter’s best friend, to dangerous, corruptive, hormone-driven terrible teenaged male who lives entirely too close. In actuality, he was pretty much the least dangerous of male specimens, held little power to corrupt me in anyway, and had my father actually took the time to see it, he would have found that he was kind of lucky that Finn of all guys happened to be my best friend. He was harmless. He was kind of like the Will to my Grace…except he wasn’t gay, of course. But he would probably hate me for putting that way, but I really can’t think of anything better.
A compromise was found between he and I and the tradition carried on, though altered in the respect that it wasn’t necessarily every weekend and it was never at Finn’s house anymore and it was always to be kept to the safe ground of our living room where my father could patrol if he wished. It was ridiculous, but I gave in rather than face the alternative of seeing an event spanning over ten years suddenly come to a demanded end. Finn thought the same, though began to fear my father to and even stronger degree.
So alas came our last night in Aberdeen; the last time we were to sleep under the same roofs as we did when we were but children, the last time to have the same address we had as when we were in grade school rather than some random dorm room number, and the last time in a long time that things could be as they had always been. So what did the two of us decide to do to commemorate the occasion, but to break the rules and serve tradition in the most traditional of senses.
My parents were not in a the least bit night owls and, considering we lived in the middle of nowhere, we thought little of locking our doors at night. Both made it very convenient for Finn to slip unnoticed from his own house and next door to mine. My house was old, decades old, and very loud when everything else around fell silent, but conveniently for us, the anxiety of leaving had caused temporary insomnia for myself, so I was hoping that any random footsteps overheard would be assumed as mine. It wasn’t that Finn was an overly worrisome nervous person, actually of the two of us that person was me, but whenever my father was factored into the equation he became overly cautious rather than his normal carefree self. It was ten o’clock and my door opened towards me without any effort from me and knew he had made a successful journey.
“How is it possible that we are now two legal adults and yet we still find ourselves being more secretive than was necessary before?” He had gone all out to keep from breaking tradition. He was wearing his pajamas, albeit “grown-up” pajamas of blue plaid rather than the footie superman ones of years past. His arms weren’t completely filled with blankets, mostly because at one point his arms were small enough to be filled completely with only one blanket, and that was simply not the case these days. In his free hand was a familiar movie case, Casablanca; my favorite…not so much for him.
“Because it’s just more fun that way?” I got up from where I was sitting at my computer desk, saved whatever little piece that I was writing and closed my laptop to adequately welcome him. I no sooner looked up and took a step forward and he had already caught up with me, his lightly freckled arms wrapped around me so tightly that I found it impossible to break free. My cheek was pressed up against his chest able to feel every bit of laughter he had to offer. “Sorry, but I forgot the popcorn…” He whispered through my hair.
I found it hard to fathom how life would be like without Finn, without my best friend, my other half. Things had never been particularly difficult between us, no long lengths of time that we went without speaking to each other, no moments in time where I ever wonder whether we were done, whether we would stop being friends because of anything that happened between us. Our little squabbles were fiery but fizzled fast. But we had never encountered anything so monumental as moving away, as heading off to college. I had heard horror stories of other friendships drifting off to nothingness when two different colleges and a few hundred miles became a barrier. Would the same thing serve as such an obstacle for the two of us? We were impossibly good friends, but we didn’t have super powers.
We lay on my bed, silent, watching the opening credits in black and white. My thoughts were moving a mile a minute and he knew it. Normal people would have figured silence to be a normal state of mine, but Finn, he knew better. Contrary to popular belief, I was a bumbling babbling idiot most of the time. “What’s wrong, Kat?” Oh, jeeze. He called me Kat, and he had that worried furrowed brow look on his face that he always had when he was worried. He rearranged himself, his arm draped around my shoulders, being me closer to him in his subconscious protective way that came out in him more often than he would admit.
“Will you promise me that things won’t change once we leave?” Whenever I spoke, despite how long I had mulled over and over what I was going to say, it always came out as if it just popped into my head, all unedited and unintelligent sounding. I’m sure I sounded like a worried little kid, but in some sense, I think I was.
“I can’t do that.” He stated it so bluntly that it felt like my stomach had fallen to my knees. My whole frame must have frozen for a split second, enough for him to take notice because he quickly continued. But I had a feeling that it wasn’t going to get much better. “It’s inevitable. There’s no escaping it.” I could feel his fingers resting lightly on my upper arm; he always felt blazing hot to me, but it was more so that usual. “We’re always changing; everyday, every second. We’re changing now as we speak, little by little, and there’s nothing we can d o to make it stop…it just happens.” Why was he all gloom and doom all of a sudden? That was usually my job, not his.
“Well then…promise me that we won’t change so much that we aren’t the same people anymore.” My tone was light, anything to bring up the mood of the room. Maybe I was a little over positive, grasping at straws, but it was necessary thing. “Promise me that we won’t lose us, that we’ll still keep whatever it is that we’ve got here.”
“Okay…but I don’t know why you’re so worried about it.” His sober stare directed towards the movie playing, one I knew he couldn‘t have found that interesting, broke into a smile. It was a “Finn smile”, one of those one was that could be read in all of his features; his eyes, most importantly. Maybe it was an Irish thing because, according to him, I was capable of the same. “Come on, we’re just going to college. It’s not like you’re going to a convent and I’m going to hell itself. We can’t change that much.”
“Actually, if you were to ask my mother, where you’re going is more of the convent than Boston...and why is the concept of a convent most associated with me? Why am I all of sudden so ‘nun-like’?” The more I spoke, the faster the words escaped from my mouth leaving little room for him to interject. If the whole writing thing didn’t work out, I figured I’d probably be pretty talented at being one of those, usually foreign, rapid fire telemarketers.
“Well, of the two of us…” His words faded out, mostly because the first six sufficed in luring my mind down the path as his was going. I figured that he thought it best to call it quits before he said too much and got me angry.
Though, of course, I knew all of that, every little thing he wished to say but refrained from doing so for the sake of his own safety. I would have thought he knew better than to even begin in that general direction. “Is this a sexist thing…or that ‘men typically go to a monastery not a convent’, or do you truly think I am that boring?”
“Ouch…you just burned a ton of sisters right there.” His smart little smirk had taken over his face, the one feature to which all of your attention was drawn, but no sooner he did so, he quickly turned and buried his face in my shoulder. He was being a smart ass as usual and even worse he thought, often, that being cutesy negated it all.“…And for the record, no. You are not boring.”

Where Did the Good Go

Goodbyes were something at which I was never really that gifted. Actually, I was pretty much terrible at them. My family wasn’t the “musical houses” type; I’d never moved in my life and rarely did the people around me. Aberdeen was a town than once you were there as an adult, you just never left, so therefore my parents’ roots were deeply rooted here. I wasn’t very experienced at this stuff. It never felt like saying goodbye and stealing a hug was ever enough. It would lead me to useless rambling and not wanting to let go of them, in every sense of the word. Where was the "good" in goodbye anyway? It was a terrible lie.
We both watched as she walked towards the door, our arms still remembering the farewell embrace with which she had just left us both. She was crying. I remember it exactly because it was something she never did. Actually, she’d rather die than be caught crying; the weak girlish act that it was. She turned abruptly in the doorway, as if she was about to make a run for it in the direction opposite of the way she was headed, but instead of sprinting back towards the two of us, she simply offered a final wave and a weak smile, her words apparently malfunctioning at that moment. The horn beeped again, her parents with their car packed impatient with our never ending goodbyes.
Part of it didn’t feel quite real to me, like when she finally closed the door it would open right up again and she would be standing on the other side, like it had been just some little joke of hers, the worst fake-out imaginable. But when the door closed and remained closed, I knew that was it. She was actually leaving.
“She will be back, you know.” Finn offered in soft words, a hint of laughter stringing them together. He moved towards me. I couldn’t see, but I could hear him, his light footsteps on the hardwood of the living room floor. Though my feet were frozen in their last steps taken, toes pointing toward the door, he couldn’t surprise me. That was the thing about old farm houses, they were sneak-proof, the floor boards protesting their years of use with every step. But I still didn’t move to acknowledge him. I couldn’t.
Too many thoughts were scattering in all directions of my mind, like a rubber ball dropped down a flight of stairs. I didn’t think that what I had just done, in theory, was going to be as difficult as it proved to be. I knew I would in fact see her again. She hadn’t died for heaven’s sake, but I acted as if she had. And the hardest thing was, that wasn’t the last time I would ever have to do that. The hardest was yet to come. It wasn’t that Sadie wasn’t important to me, but in comparison to Finn, there was far less history binding us together.
“O’Malley…” He whispered in my ear, and I jumped out of my skin. I had been too preoccupied with my outburst of anxiety to remember that he was still there with me. He hadn’t left, though I had been thinking so much about it that it felt like he already had.
I scurried to return my face to its normal appearance. Damn tears, stupid girly tears. I wasn’t supposed to do stuff like that. I was better than that, stronger that. But it was pointless to try because he already knew. It was nothing he hadn’t seen before, but it had become such a force of habit with everyone else.
“You still haven’t finished packing, have you?” He knew too well of myself to think anything else and, therefore, didn’t feel the need me to say anything in response to assume it true. Instead, his arm around my shoulder worked its hardest to unglue my feet and direct me towards the stairs, or in any direction for that matter. Though once he did, I scurried up the stairs on my own accord, leaving him to follow up the old creaking steps.
My room was a complete mess, its appearance to anyone else looking reminiscent to that of a tornado’s aftermath, but to me it was just organized chaos. All of my clothing, instead of folded neatly in my dresser drawers, were tossed in large mounds of fabric; one for certain yeses, one for those I would most definitely be leaving behind, and a series of piles that would depend on how much room I would have left, or what would be left home until the seasons decided to change. Nothing much was in boxes; they lay empty in in one corner of the room. It gave me a sudden headache as soon as I stepped through the doorway. Considering that, I couldn’t help but to make a b-line for my bed, landing right in the middle of it, though trying my best not to disturb the box of photographs I left there, the only box of which I knew I was not leaving behind any of its contents when I left.
“It’s worse than I thought!” That happened to be his response upon stepping through the doorway. Whereas he probably sprinted down the hallway, sliding in his socks for part of it as he usually did, he found himself suddenly slowed once he saw the mess through which he was sure he would find himself sifting whether he wished to or not. His eyes finally landed upon me and the disgusted look on my face and he cracked a smile. “It won’t take too long. Just throw it all in the boxes and you’ll be done. Nothing to worry about.” He shuffled his feet across the floor making a pathway in my direction, rather than step on my things as I had done.
“Alas, no. That is not in fact the case.” I scooted myself over, giving him room to sit down if he wished, but instead, he still stood, arms folded across his chest. “I will have even more about which to worry, because once I’m packed, that means I actually have to leave here.” Whenever I wanted to exceptionally persuasive I had to arrange my words like an English teacher, as grammatically correct as I could find possible. Finn always hated that, which made me do it all the more often.
“You still have to leave whether you have stuff to bring with you or not. So you’re really accomplishing nothing there.” He leaned forward, a hand extended for me. I took it willingly, but instead pulled swiftly and he easily fell over, his form landing with a clumsy bounce at my side. “Come on, just do it…for me?”
Persuasion was something for which the two of us had quite a knack. If only everyone else we ever encountered was just like ourselves we could have in our possession all we ever wanted pretty much. The kid’s pout and batting eyelashes were something he knew I was incapable of ignoring. I would avoid looking at him like he was Medusa himself, but he knew that regardless of how much effort I would give it, it would never go as planned. I would give in after a few minute fight and he would get me to do whatever he wanted. It was a good thing he never found reason enough to hate me. After a sigh of worthless protest, I laughed. That was perhaps the last time that would happen for quite some time, and for once, I actually I felt like I was going to miss it.

Just Like We Planned

I had applied to Boston College after I saw the place while on vacation, doubting I’d get in and, more importantly, doubting my mother would help foot the bill if I didn’t choose a place near enough that she could stop by any random day she felt like making sure that I remembered to eat now that she wasn’t around, or some other completely screwed up reason to believe that I couldn’t survive on my own. But for some completely bizarre, hard to believe reason I got a letter in the mail around Christmas with the most life-changing word inscribed on the heading: “Congratulations!” I was half expecting to see it addressed to some "Katherine" O' Malley or some other name that could have been confused with mine and sent to me by mistake. And even more surprising was how insane she thought me, after taking a look at the financial aid package I had been offered, for even hesitating to make up my mind, though of course, it still was not without crying as if I had died in a freak bus accident. With in a short amount of time she had returned to normalness and was getting out her check book to make out the first payment.
But I was the hesitant one. I wasn’t crazy. Boston was about a half a day away from home. I was okay with leaving my parents behind; I was supposed to be okay with that. I was eighteen for heaven’s sake, you were daft if you weren’t jumping for joy. But it wasn’t just my parents whom I was leaving behind, but my friends, the few I had. I didn’t have an overabundance of them like some girls did in high school. Whereas they had a whole address book full, I could count mine on one hand. But for me it wasn’t about the numbers, but about how much they cared and how much I could count on them to be there for me, ice cream in hand, when I was having a particularly bad day. There was rarely a day that went by when I didn’t see them, either by some preplanned day of gallivanting around town, some spur of the moment need to hang out at the local coffee shop and just catch up on the last twenty-four hours of our lives that had passed since we all had last seen each other, or just random occurrences when we’d stumble upon each others’ presences while downtown; our town was only so big and it would happen more often than one would think. The more I thought of it, the more bizarre it seemed that there would be one day in the not so distant future that we’d have to go weeks or months at a time with only phone calls and quirky little email messages to keep us from drifting apart.
Of the whole list of different colleges we were all planning on attending, mine was the furthest away. They were all staying safely within the confines of our lovely state of Pennsylvania, but I and my over rebellious, overly optimistic, need to escape everything that seemed to be holding me back from being completely and utterly happy with my life and where it was going, made me feel as if that was about the last thing I ever wanted to do. The one thing that made it okay was the little bit of hope that maybe Finn would follow me. I could get past my other friends leaving for college, all of us scattering in different directions, because it just seemed natural. It was a step we were all taking at the same time, just another thing to bond us all together. Sure, Finn and I were leaving at the same time as well, but Finn was different; with Finn it was always different.
Carey Finnegan, "Finn", and I had been friends ever since we were both still sea monkeys. Our parents were neighbors; our mothers, best friends. So naturally, we became likewise, though minus the gossiping over a day of shoe shopping; though I can’t say I never tried that of course. Unlike my other friends, he had been there for absolutely everything. He had been the one with whom I went crayfish-catching when I was about seven, and happened to be the one who helped me back home after I had fallen in, my knees skinned and my clothes completely drenched. And then years on down the line I had been the one help him, not back home, but to our old abandoned barn to sleep off his terrible first night of drinking, his parents asleep at home none the wiser. If there were ever two more inseparable people…well, there wasn’t. We were the two most inseparably bonded people I had ever met, like even those weird cases of Siamese twins joined at the head that you see on the Discovery health channel all the time. We were them, but much less inconvenient.
I guess I just had assumed that because Finn had been a part of every stage of my past, we’d continue to sail through life side by side like that was how it had always been meant to be. He had been such a part of my life that life didn’t feel like it would be life if he played a lesser role in it. We had grown up talking about how we’d finally get out of this town and that we would do it together, side by side. He had tossed around the idea of going to Boston and about trying his best to actually make a living off of his hobby of music. We leafed through books of information about one particular place, Boston College, which was conveniently a good place for writers and musicians like ourselves. Our eyes bugged out with excitement, like kids at Disneyland…and then, in a snap decision, he just changed his mind. The deadline came and went, and his blank application still sat upon his desk. We were leaving for college in a week, and rather that heading off in the same direction, he was backing up for some small public college only a few hours away from home, and for all intents and purposes I was moving a whole world away.
Part of me was insanely angry, but even more angry about how unjustified the emotion was. It wasn’t as if he didn’t get in, that he decided in the end that some other school was better suited for him, but that he didn’t even try. I never officially asked why he did it, but it was as if he wanted it to not even be an option for himself, like he was looking for an excuse for me as to why he was bailing on everything we had talked about ten times over. But then again, I couldn’t expect him to base his whole future on what plans I had just because his weren’t as neurotically figured out as mine had been for years now. I had always agreed with the statement that you should never schedule your future around other people because they might not always be there, that you should do what you believe what is right, not follow someone else and their path for the future, but tread in the way that you think is right for your own…and all that other philosophical junk. He couldn’t just toss out his plans simply to appease me, and if he did with that as his only motivation, it wouldn’t have made me any happier to tell you the truth. But for the longest time I had just assumed that our destinies ran parallel to each others', rather than completely askew.
He was going to be my lifeline, as he pretty much was already. I thought he was going to be the one thing to most easily convince my mother that I would not in fact die if I moved to a city any bigger that tiny old Aberdeen. Sure, Finn wasn’t the biggest, most intimidating guy imaginable, but by my mother’s definition, he was a guy and therefore capable of keeping young little defenseless me out of harm’s way. He would live next door, not with me of course because mother found that some how inappropriate for two youthful co-eds. She had never understood things between us in our high school days; she was most definitely not going to believe the platonic nature of two mixed gender friends when out of range of her little microscope. But for some reason, even though her tiny mind believed that as soon as we were out of her sight he and I would suddenly believe that rampant sexcapades between the two of us would be a brilliant idea, she would at least know that I was alive and breathing if he was around. It was the lesser of two evils. But he wasn’t going, so I guess in that respect she would be marginally happy. Some how, some way, she had managed to rearrange her logic. I would be journeying to the city alone, and she had granted me her permission, albeit warily, to go. Maybe she wanted some slasher to crawl in my bathroom window and do away with me, but our relationship wasn’t nearly that screwed up for me to believe such a thing. Maybe it was only me who thought things would be better if Finn was just there living next door in case I needed him.
I decided to go to Boston anyway, though not without a little whining and complaining, mostly to myself, about my self-centered disappointment. And of course I didn’t do so without a hint of bitterness, the thought that I was going to make sure that I had a better time than I could have ever imagined I would have had tugging around Finn’s dead weight. He was meant to pursue his future at Mansfield just as I knew in all of my being that Boston College was where I belonged and I had to understand that. I was going to be okay with his decision, just as he was okay with mine. I was going to smile and nod and be happy for him, but secretly I was going to make him regret not coming along with all of the crazy, unimaginably fun, stories I’d have to tell after a few months…hopefully.

Don't Stop Believing

If it had been up to me, and if money had not been the elephant of an obstacle that it happened to be. I would be leaving town after graduation and shipping up to Boston. I don't really know what it was that drew me to the place, but I was infatuated with it. I had only spent two days there in my life, on a trip there with the Finnegans. It must have been love at first sight; completely impractical person to person, but person to city...of course. It had all of the artsy atmosphere that I liked about the Village in New York, but without the snobbish attitude. And there was something about the history intertwined with the city that made it far more interesting than anywhere else that I had ever found myself.
I’d go to some amazing liberal arts school learning how to pen the next American classic and live in a disheveled South End apartment surrounded by lively open-minded, artist types, dye my hair bright red or something, and be completely self-destructive like my literary heroes. I would spend my days writing away in some intellectual bookstore-slash-coffee shop and my nights hanging with musicians in little Irish Pubs. I wouldn’t have much, actually, hardly anything to my name, but by choice rather than chance. It would just be me, my cat, my writing, and the occasional tortured musician or penniless poet that may cross my path and sweep me off of my bare feet in the mean time.
Of course that wouldn’t continue forever. Eventually something of mine would pass under a publisher’s impressed eye and boxes of perfectly bound books would be rolling off the presses, my name emblazoned on the cover in those metallic gold raised letters and a deeply thoughtful black and white photograph of me on the back. I would be able to afford nearly anything I could possibly desire; a better place to live, one with a movie set spiral staircase and a library full of old books with those sliding little ladders, the completion of my Beatles’ record collection, and of course a closet fully stocked with beautiful shoes. Boston would be my home, but places like London and Dublin would begin to feel like a close replacement after a while. And I would be just as happy.
The only thing I hadn’t figured out was the company I’d keep. I liked the friends I had and I found it quite doubtful that given the near six-hundred thousand or so people that would be buzzing around me, none of them would come remotely close to what I had with my relationship with Finn…or what I wanted with Finn. A person like that only comes around once for a girl and to go running in the opposite direction seemed like flaw in my whole master plan.
The picture in my mother’s mind that was most associated with my best friend involved me and a white wedding dress. I didn’t see that per se, but I didn’t picture myself cutting him out of my life anytime soon. He was my best friend and I had assumed that it was in the cards that no matter what either of us did with our lives, whatever weird connection was between us would be enough to keep from losing each other completely. Our lives seemed to be impossibly intertwined from the very start and the more milestones we endured side by side, the more little strings that tethered us closer together. But our time was up. In a matter of days I would embark on the lovely eight hour drive in a packed car with my parents to move into college.

Just a Small Town Girl...

If my mother had her way, I would be spending the rest of my life in Aberdeen, less than a mile from my parents’ house and my childhood home, at least until they turned the farm over to me to “keep it in the family”. Sure, it was a beautiful home, comparable to something I’d want for my family in the future, but I’d already lived there. It would never feel like my home, but my parents’ still. And of course along with the house would come the farm; the cows, the early mornings, the feeling of being tied to one plot of land until I died or finally found someone crazy enough to think they could make a better profit off of it than I could. I didn’t want to feel without options, unable to leave at a moment’s notice. I wanted to travel the world, see more than my own backyard and the simple life my mother had led that I just knew was never going to be for me. To choose that would mean settling for something short of what I had seen so vividly in my mind since I was just young.
Parents always say when we’re little kids, that we can be what we want to be, do what we want to do when we grow older, but as soon as you make up your mind and have discovered your passion in life, suddenly they happen to change their minds. Whatever you believe to be your path in life is suddenly not safe enough, not as promising, not as respectable as they pictured for you. Every parent wants their kid to gain aspirations of becoming some great surgeon or a money making lawyer, but did they ever think that perhaps a prosperous career doesn’t always make a person happy? Parents want their kids to be happy until they come home claiming they’re going to be an artist painting portraits on the streets of Paris, the author of the next bestselling novel, or…a rodeo clown or something. Suddenly happiness just in not in the cards. She never flat out told me what kind of career she wanted me have, but the assumption that I’d remain for the rest of my life in a town with nothing to offer would limit that to something along the lines of breaking up drunken-man fights tending bar or price checking cat food at the general store…both of which would probably cause me to shoot myself before the end of my first week.
The most irksome of all was the way she had had my wedding planned ever since my playdates with Finn when I was four years old. Her constant little comments whenever she’d see the two of us together, and her weaseling little ways to try her darnedest to make things happen for the two of us; requesting he accompany me to run her errands on random Saturday afternoons or inviting him over for Sunday lunches. She never realized that it was never going to be that simple. Just because our neighbors happened to have “a decent young man” as a son, that did not necessarily make this girl next door his obvious soul mate, as convenient that may have seemed for everyone. This wasn’t the seventeen hundreds; arranged marriages were never going to be in-vogue.
I know that she was only looking out for me. Staying in town was the safe thing to do, the one thing that wouldn’t get my spirits snapped to pieces. There was little rejection to be had in Aberdeen unlike Boston, a "big city" and therefore something with the ability to chew you up and spit you out. She didn’t want me to get hurt, in any context of the word. Staying in Aberdeen meant staying under the watchful eyes of momma O‘Malley. Staying in Aberdeen meant that my stupid dreams, although unfulfilled, still remained intact. But since when did she assume me so fragile of a thing? One little cough and I wouldn’t crack a rib. I was not her little girl anymore, no matter how much she wished that to be the truth.

Another Beginning's End

It seems to be that packing up all your most prized possessions has a way of putting things in perspective. When you’re leaving a life behind and heading out into the great unknown, you can only tug so much baggage along with you. With a whole room full of objects that you’ve managed to accumulate in eighteen years, something has to be left behind. So you sift through your closet, throw out clothes you’d forgotten you had outgrown, all the childish things for which you’ll never find a need again. You’ll leave behind in that room all the things you just don’t want; the ugly frilly pink shirt that your grandmother got you for Christmas, your old television with mis-wired buttons that changes channels by itself. You take along with you only the things deemed most important, things you simply can’t live without; your collection of journals documenting the trials of teenage life which happen to feel more trivial by the day, a box full of photographs captured in each one someone dear to you, or the pair of perfectly worn in shoes that you have to bring with you or risk your mother finally throwing them away while you’re gone.
But sometimes it’s not that easy. Sometimes you don’t have a choice about what you can keep and what you have to leave behind when you go. Sometimes the things you want to bring aren’t things you can fold up in a box and toss in the trunk. The most important things aren’t things at all. If they are, your priorities aren’t anywhere close to being right. You have to say goodbye to some of the best people to ever grace your presence. You can keep in touch; you can plan to meet back up an unset amount of time later, but they can’t and won’t always be there for you in the ways they used to be. Sometimes the things you want more than anything to just leave hanging in your closet back at home will refuse to stay there. The stigma of being a small town girl regardless of how educated about the rest of the world you may become, your habit of fearing failure in regards to things that you’ve never even attempted before, or all of the past that you’d rather not remember ever existed; no matter how hard you shove to keep it all hidden away somewhere in your bedroom back home, they all have a nasty way of sticking with you like gum to the bottom of your favorite pair of shoes.
When you look at the boxes, what you’ve managed to fit inside and what has come along against your will, it’s like taking a look outside yourself, all the things that mean something to you, your identity, screaming so loudly that nothing else can be heard. But you can’t help but wonder whether a year later that portrait of yourself will still be the same; will you still see the same things playing such a large role in your life? Will leaving behind all you’ve ever known change you into a person you can’t even recognize? Will the world be as accepting of that box of stuff as you are? Will they just pass over you as something not good enough for someone from somewhere other than from where you originated? As unforgiving as that place was, will the rest of the world be even worse? Will you survive in one piece, or retreat back home broken in spirit?
It’s terrifying, sure enough, but maybe it’s just the one thing you’ve always needed but just never knew it; a test, a challenge, a chance to start all over again. It's an opportunity to make more of yourself than you could have where you were your most comfortable. Only it’s the departure from the company of those good comfortable friends and the chance that you could lose them for good that makes it feel like it might not be completely worth it for a fleeting moment.