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.