It’s hard to say goodbye. To the people we used to be. All the people we used to be. To the places that once held us. To the way we were.

I used to be a person with a father. I used to be a person with seven jobs at all times (this is not an exaggeration). I used to be a person who loved living in the foothills of the Rockies, a person with two beautiful cats who loved me more than anything, who lived with me in a beautiful third floor walk up with floor to ceiling windows. An apartment that felt like living in a tree house where we would open the windows and lie on the floor together and do nothing, late at night. Sundays. I used to be a person with real problems, a person who could have burned it all down, a person who almost burned it all down. I used to be a person who wanted things I simply could not have.

I am no longer any of these people.

And there’s some grief in that, in the not being. In cutting the ties once and for all. In walking away.

But I also know that this is what change looks like. This is what growth looks like.

Nothing about my life looks like it did a few years ago when I accepted a job that took me out of Colorado for the first time since I moved to Boulder in 2005. I spent much of that year homesick, wishing I were home, in Colorado. Where people knew me. Where people thought they knew me. And then when the year was over, and I was back home in Colorado, it didn’t feel the same. Because I wasn’t the same. I’m not the same. And I no longer feel at home in Colorado, though I am grateful for the lessons I learned, for the friends I made, for the ways in which I grew in that space. I grew so much.

And now it’s time to grow somewhere else, I guess.

Life is funny. It really, really is. Here I am, laughing.

The universe always gives us exactly what we need. What a cliché, I know, but man: that shit is true. All the paths we don’t choose – they hurt sometimes, when we think about them, fixate on what could have been – even though we know, we know what a beautiful thing we’ve let into our lives.

What a beautiful thing I’ve let into my life.

we are
joan of arc
saint of the eternal
a beating heart on fire
on fire, on fire and drowning in fire
without end
this world is such a beautiful thing
and I dreamt you told me
you believe in god