Redan Innan

Overwhelmed isn't the half of it. I forget to breathe, I forget that an entire world waits for me at the other end of this ocean, this life is too large, too long, too impossible to endure without closing doors and never looking back. If you carry every day, every person, every bittersweet summer night in your arms you will sink, you will never be able to say your farewells, you said too many for a while and now you won't do it anymore. I packed up the remains of a life and stowed it away safely with someone whose voice is etched into the side of my spine, and when the time came for the train to leave, there was nothing left but the bag on my back. We rolled slowly out of the little town, rocked gently past the bike path and lakes of my youth, houses where I've lived and loved, dialects I didn't learn until I left them. On my last run in the early morning, I curved around a little island in the river to see the old stone bridge; rumor has it its architect jumped from the bridge to his death for lack of faith in it, but 200 years later there's a lesson in there I can't quite place my finger on. I finished the run with a whole new book in my head, and isn't that the gift after all: to take this tangled mess of every life lived, and create something new, something whole. We heal ourselves as best we can.

I carry five generations of my people in this bag, see their hopes and dreams and monotonous routines reduced to a few precious pieces in my life. Still they remain, and their stories in my chest. I carry them across the world, did they know? Could they guess? When they looked at their life what did they think was the point? At the edge of the river lies an island that knows my name when I forget it myself. This life is too large, too long, too impossible, but hell if I won't carry it to the ends of the earth, hell if I won't live an entire life and ride this wave to shore.