I wrote this in the week that I was leaving Cambridge with no set plans of coming back. Serendipitously I came across this again for the first time today when I’m making my planning preparations to go back to Cambridge this month (for a short time). Life can be mysteriously delightful and cathartic sometimes.
It was the picture frames that came down first, the fridge magnets, the posters on the wall…then the little shelves and boxes…the dining table loaded with things that did and did not belong on it. The place is beginning to feel more like an apartment than a home now and urging me to think back to my first few days in the place. How can this place look the same and yet feel so different now — those first few days full of strangeness and yet such promise and hope and these last few days full of a different kind of strangeness and the bitter-sweetness of goodbye. And while things seem to be moving out of the apartment for the most part, letters and the sweetest words from friends who have become family fill up all the void in this physical space and stop my heart from thinking about the goodbyes. This has been a home — many miles away from my home.
I’ve kept all my feelings in a box. These big transitions and life decisions have a way of making you go back to finding comfort in denial. No, this change is not permanent. I will see all these people I love very soon. Nothing else will take up all my time and energy. I’ve forced myself to not think about any goodbyes. And for the most part it has been easy to just focus on the now and the present and enjoy every bit of sunshine that Cambridge has to offer. I’ve kept the letters from friends in a box too, knowing that they need time and space to open. But I get this one letter and it’s tempting me to take a look — because this one friend’s words I have never been able to resist. And so I give in — open up the folded piece written in ink in this beautiful hand. And surely, the box of feelings bursts open from the very first line and I can’t tell if they’re feelings of nostalgia or sadness or just an overflow of love and gratitude that I feel for this experience and these ‘heart people’ in my life that I know I will carry with me and turn back to no matter what I do and where I go.
It’s their faith in me that is pushing me to take this next step. Someone recently said to me that it takes courage to make this decision and to leave the promise of all that I had here behind and follow another path. But it’s not my courage alone. It cannot be — that would be too heavy a weight. It’s courage built on the faith and support of all the people with me in my two homes now. People who see me, believe in me, and tell me that I can do something of service to my community. That is what pushes me and allows me to think that I can. The path forward will not be straight. The one I was on wasn’t either and in retrospect things always look way more rosy than they ever were. But one thing that I know was just as rosy and just as beautiful as it feels now is the friendships and the relationships built in my time here. And in the end, as cliche as it might be, it is all about the people in your life.
