Maybe She Was Better At Leaving Than Staying.
Maybe she had made a huge mess of things again.
All she knew was that her lungs were so tired of breathing in the suffocating scent of stale air and sour memories—she needed fresh evergreen breezes and the wild expanse of new possibilities.
Was she a coward? Or, was she courageous?
She didn’t give a damn either way.
She was ready to do what she needed to do for the sake of her soul.
She wasn’t afraid to wipe the slate clean. She wasn’t afraid to tell the past to go f*ck itself. She wasn’t afraid to go off solo and spread her wings in a brand new way. She wasn’t afraid to follow the tenuous threads of her dreams and see where each glittering fiber would lead—whose paths she would cross, what explosions of love and gritty truth she could create.
When life becomes a suffocating prison, we always have the option to break free.
She knew this, in the feathery depths of her falcon soul, from the trembling heights of her wandering spirit, from the rocky valleys of her flowing tears.
She moved with the wind, with the melting shadow of the sun—-she moved when the whispers of her heart told her to.
This could seem like a lonely, nomadic existence, but it was not lonely for her. In her mind, there was no richer company than the open road, the whipping winds dancing through her hair, the seductive song of the strawberry sunset in her rearview mirror and the restless chatter of dreams filling her ears like the excited buzz of poems not yet written.
She left.
She left everything behind. She crossed cities, small towns and state lines.
She left behind frayed friendships and mistakes and loves gone terribly wrong,
She left it all behind in the blink of an eye.
She was not sad.
It would have been nice and pretty to say that she was devastated with grief, but she wasn’t. Her tears were of blossoming hope; they were not tinged bitter with the sting of regret.
For her, goodbyes always held this wild sort of magic, this tingly influx of raw energy. She could sense the buzzing lilac scent of new possibilities through each sticky layer of pain and feel new life budding—ruby red, streaked with purple, sprouting lush emerald leaves, growing tenderly—in her veins. If endings were like the icy depths of winter, new beginnings were like spring. And she was so ready for spring.
So she left.
She left in a lightning flash, in a mad dash of hope. She stormed outside like the fiercest wind, and moved the hell on.
She let the harsh pain of the past slip through her fingertips, like scratchy grains of sand. She had suffered long enough—for far too long—and she was done torturing herself, blaming herself mercilessly for everything. She was done apologizing for who she was, done holding tightly to the tattered ropes of things that would never be.
She threw the ashen remains of the confused girl she used to be, of all the tough sh*t she had been through, to the fingernail edge of the crescent moon—a gesture of truth and forgiveness and transmuted beauty.
And then, on the coattails of her own excited exhale, she left.
She rejoined her jeweled soul in a majestic mountain land, soaked with sun, speckled with evergreens. She walked forward, with brave feet, feeling a thousand pounds lighter, with fresh skin and a ripe, open heart.
Maybe she was better at leaving than staying.
Maybe she had made a huge mess of things again.
All she knew was that her lungs were so damn tired of breathing in the stale scent of sour memories. She needed fresh evergreen breezes and the wild expanse of new possibilities.
And so it was.
She said goodbye to a life that was never hers.
She said hello the sparkling emerald seas of destiny.
Because she had always known that when our days start to feel like a suffocating prison, we can break free.
So she did.
And freedom, oh sweet freedom—it tasted juicier than she’d ever dreamed.
~
Author: Sarah Harvey
Originally appeared on Elephant journal
COMMENTS