@JohnLewis-rt1tu

1 year ago

Writing this with tears in my eyes…This is such an uncommon message for a song, and one I never knew I needed to hear until I heard this. I’m 25. Grew up in a small town in southern Indiana. Went to the college of my dreams in the south suburbs of Chicago. I graduated two months after the world went into slumber when the sickness arrived. I was scared as hell for that next big leap into life, but I made it anyway, starting my career in a place whose roads my tires didn’t recognize, passing faces whose smiles my heart didn’t know. Because I wanted to make a difference. While I set out to do that, the world kept spinning and kids in my life back home kept growing up and my dad kept getting sicker and the distance between here and home seemed to grow wider. A year into that “next chapter” and my my sister was hit and killed by a drunk driver three weeks after her college graduation (2021). Almost packed up my bags and went home then because life and impermanence were much less abstract and hit a lot closer to home after that. Family, meanwhile, felt farther from it.

But for different reasons, I stayed. Even bought my first house another year later. I look back on what, and who, these past three years have brought me, and in spite of the pains and the heartache and the homesickness, I’m glad I packed up my car. I’m glad I said what I felt. I am sad, and I am grateful, and I am trying to be where I am.

There’s a lot of mixed feelings about this whole experience. Thanks for giving a voice to some of them.

I think I might be going back home next year.

578 |