You grow up in a city, make friends, go to school, spend time with family and you find yourself creating your life in this place simply out of obligation. Some can call this place home forever, finding a career and a family close to the place that they have always called home. Others are not so lucky, never feeling like their hometowns understand what they need out of life. This is for those of us that need a clean break from that town that never fails to get us down.
Dear home,
I don’t know if I can call you that anymore, though that isn’t entirely your fault. I felt that I needed to write you this letter so that you can understand, because God knows it took me a while to understand myself.
It’s been you and I since before I can remember: you’ve been there through every word I first began speaking, every first day of school, every middle school boyfriend in the series of middle school boyfriends. You gave me a place to make new friends, and sift through the ones that were undeserving of my friendship. You gave me a place to spend time with my family, to grow alongside them and become a person that emulates all the things I love about them. You gave me a place to laugh, roads to travel on with the music turned up loud and laughing with people that I loved. You gave me a place to grow and a place to create a foundation that would help me create the person that I would, one day, eventually become.
But you also gave me things I resent you for, things that make me cringe to look back at some days. You saw the way that I struggled sometimes, trying so hard to be seventeen, smart, honest, kind, noticed, and beautiful all at the same time. Some people bragged about how much they loved you, how close they felt to you and I knew that I would never know you that way. I remember times that the world felt so small inside of your borders, all the people inside entering the same endless cycle of 9-to-5 careers and two children and a white picket fence. I knew, even then, that you and I would never last.
But I never thought the day would come that I would be strong enough to do it- to leave without glancing in the rearview mirror. But there’s something freeing about walking away when you discover that something was holding you back more than you would have liked to admit. Unfortunately, that something is you.
It’s not you: It’s me. I changed, and the life of adequacy I could have had of you fell to the back burner when I saw the life of potential that I can have if I leave you. You and I were never destined to be together forever. You have people that will love you forever and will find everything they ever needed within you, but I need things that you are not able to give me. This is not easy for me either, leaving everything that I know and creating something that I’m not sure will last. But I at least have to try.
This isn’t to say that I won’t keep a bookmark in your chapter of my past, that I won’t leaf through one day and find myself on an airplane and heading straight for you. I will still enjoy Christmas seasons and weekend trips to come and visit the place so familiar to me. But I cannot grow into the person that I want to be by living in the past.
This place never changes: I do.
I’m sorry. Best Wishes.
