This has been a place of leaving for a long time now, this place of heat and swelter. I feel like I'm always the one speaking of leaving but it's always friends and acquaintances making the journey. I've said good bye to so many people since I've lived here, and the streets are beginning to feel lonely. Our neighborhood is lonely, the darkened streets no longer a place of camaraderie over long dog walks, the yard no longer a place of barefoot little girls and fishing trips off our dock.
Still, this place, these walls and this grass and these trees are still home. I know that one day we will leave, maybe (hopefully) for mountains and forests and a place where winter means snow, and I'll probably be sad on some level. Maybe I will even envy the ones remaining in place, if only because they're in the security of sameness. Maybe not. More likely, we'll be excited for new adventures, for new places to savor Sunday morning breakfasts and to hunt for treasures and to experience life together. New moonlit roads to wander with the great white beast, new avenues to drive under the welcoming sun, new conversations in which to partake with new people. I think that the hardest thing about friends leaving is the loneliness that comes with knowing their adventures are now happening without us, and that we're still walking through mostly the same ones. We're happy for them, but the sadness still remains, a whisper at our shoulder that life will move forward but in a different way.
My prayer for the rest of this year into the next (besides that we all enter it healthy and whole) is that we don't allow ourselves to be held back by fear. That we listen to the voices deep within and do our best to honor them, even when they scare the hell out of us and challenge us to part from the familiar and the safe. From this comes true growth and real adventure. So be it.
