Moving

Note:  My apologies for the sappiness of this post.  I will be leaving for college soon, and soon after that my family will be selling our house in Wooster and moving everything and everyone down to Marietta.

As I drove away from my friend's house late one night on the eve of his exodus to college—the beginning of the end of my summer—a huge bouquet of emotions bloomed in my brain, the seeds of which had been planted by the memories of living in this town.

These snapshots of the past, punctuated with laughter and shouting and happiness and sadness and loneliness  of bygone times all balled into one mass inside of my psyche, set off a chain reaction.

While I drove past my old high school, singing along with a hoarse voice to a song that I hoped everyone in the town could hear, I realized how much I will miss everybody who touched my life. Those who helped me become who I truly am. Those who I shared smiles with, and who were always ready to spend time with me. Those who surprised me with how amazing they actually were, and who in turn appreciated me for who I am. Those who let me into their lives, and those who grew alongside me during the most important formative years of my life so far.

Anybody that offered me love, even if I may not have always deserved it.

And as I continued my solemn night voyage through the streets and through the memories of some of my life, I could not bear to think of parting ways with everything that I had come to appreciate here. Despite my reservations, though, it is the beginning of the end, of a kind, for many of my cherished relationships with people that I have met. No longer can I visit them whenever I come home to visit my family, and no longer will I spend my breaks in between school roaming these streets for extended periods of time.

Melancholy filtered through my body, pushing with it a kind of acceptance through my veins; a realization of the inevitability of many things in life.

But with this realization came another epiphany. While I may not have the wealth of opportunities to see and appreciate my friends in person after I move, this does not spell the end of anything if I do not let things end at that. With every kind of communication at my generation's disposal currently, there is no reason to ever truly say goodbye if one can help it.

And there in the inception of that idea I began to actually and fully accept what was happening as I pulled into the driveway of my home, avoiding the curb and sliding my rusty piece of shit car behind my brother's, slamming on the emergency brake.

Moving away is always such an awful feeling. You are torn away from things that you have come to know and expect to have as your own by things that you cannot control. You often have to learn how to live your life all over again, without the friends that you had come to rely on for the past years of your life.

But moving is not an end to anything, I came to realize. Rather, it is a metamorphosis: the beginning of a change, albeit one that you can never really prepare yourself to make, or one that many would desire to make. The change of your physical location is there, to be sure, and the disruption of a great deal of activities in your life.

However, there is also a sudden but very brilliant maturation in the relationships that you hold with the people that you met that you truly care about. A realization, again, that you do not have to be near them to be an important part of their lives, and they you. It does not matter how long you have known them, or how much time you've gotten to spend with them.

Though you cannot physically see those that you have come to know and love, be it for months or years at a time, you know that they will always have a special spot in your heart.

If—when you think about moving away or being apart from your loved ones—you feel deep, reoccurring pangs of sadness, pinging from the very depths of your body in a constant rhythm like the knelling of a bell, or that the bottom of your stomach is dropping out, and you understand the important role that they have played in your life though you do not think that you could ever be without them...

Only then can you begin to properly say goodbye.