When I started this in August, I tried to live it out loud. To write about everything that was happening, good and bad. It was a lot of good, mostly, at the beginning – exciting new experiences, new places, wonderful new friends.
I wrote about my mother’s illness in November, and have written since about some of the worst of what I have seen since being back in California – and very little of the good, which is abundant, and daily, and wonderful to have. Mom and I spent an afternoon watercoloring, and talking about our travels in Italy – she was married there two years ago. This morning, we sat with my cousin Tabitha and talked about travel and family, and they tasted some communion wine Maria-Elena gave me from Greece. I leave to go back to school in four days, and I am hesitant and worried and excited about what lies ahead.
Brianna.org has been around a long time, since 1998, and in that time, I have largely maintained a policy of not writing about people in my private life. I changed that radically this past August, writing about my family, my friends, but the first mention of the boy that I had lived with every day for the seven and a half years prior to leaving for school was in that first entry about my mother. Certain things, even I wasn’t able to write about, regardless of the changes in perspective that came about in my journey to Greece. Certain things seemed too precious and painful to share.
This weekend, I saw Josh for the first time in six months, since I walked away after our last kiss at the airport in Kansas City and on toward school and a different life. I am writing about it today because that moment that I saw him at LAX on Friday, the second I recognized his walk and his hands and his whole self – well, there isn’t anything to compare it to. It makes every second of the six months apart worth that first second of sweet recognition, when you’re standing in another huge airport, in what could be any country, and you see the person you love so much that it feels like home, that you realize what is important in life. The same lesson you’ve been learning over and over again in various new ways in the last year. That life is too short for the people you love to not know it, 100%.
I am leaving again in four days, and Josh is back in Kansas City, and nobody can ever see what happens next, they just know that there’s an outcome they’re hoping for that makes the promise of the future sparkling and exciting. The next time I write here, I will be back in Paros. And I will be writing about all of it, the good and the bad, the entire story as I see it unfolding.
For now, I am taking something with me I didn’t take before.
