The Calming Effect of Change

The propensity of life to change amazes me. 

I don’t know how it still amazes me. I’ve seen myself transition and transcend countless situations, people, places. I’ve watched myself from above as aboslute truths have been shattered and inkling doubts turn to solid fact. My experience has told me: perspective is fleeting. 

Yet, when it happens, my lungs still get punched out. 

Three months ago, my life was radically different. In every way, shape and form. Friends, job, scenery, daily activities - everything. And it all changed instantaneously. One morning I was sitting in an iHop, having a hang over breakfast with my three best friends. By that afternoon I was hugging them goodbye, and come nightfall… I was in Jersey. 

I had made a deadline to myself: in December, I would know where to go. I would know what to do. I would move, and move along with life. A friend suggested I grab a map, some darts, and just close my eyes and play Russian roulette with my future. 

I thought about it. 

It wasn’t until late November I had the slightest clue where I was going to head. If you had told me in September that I’d be sitting in the house I grew up in, staring out the window at a snow mute world I would have told you to fuck off. 

But here I am, trading downtown for hometown, southern drawls for yankee brawls and sun tans for spray tans. 

What the fuck am I thinking? 

I’ll drive down this strip mall laden highway and put myself back there, back in the Carolina south where columns sat on porches and oaks swept over the roads. I’ll turn my head out the window and imagine my favorite scenes from Wilmington: the bridge to the beach at night, where the lights of sailboats would suspend like an impossibly close universe over a moon swelled sea. The main drag to downtown, where wrought iron lamp posts marked the median in dull orange glow and twisted oaks glided overhead while the world blurred by.  

I see it all so vividly. It is etched into my essence. 

Even so, I wish I had taken more pictures. Tangible scenes to my psychic landscape. But I do have a few, and they always calm me when North Eastern bustle chews my nerves and the cold soaks my soul.  

Are those my footprints… or are they Jesus’s, for he was carrying me..?