The Long Way Home - An Edinburgh Inspired Short Story // Long Vingnette

It had finally gotten cold, but only about three days ago, so she hadn’t yet been convinced this was actually the beginning of the U.K. winter she’d been warned about. She pulled her leather jacket around her a little tighter, and put as much of her hands as would fit in the small zipper pockets. She lived just on the outskirts of town, but she didn’t mind the walk. It gave her time to think, when she was in a thinking mood, which she most often was, and tonight. Most of the time she thought about her day, about her resolutions for the next (to leave her bed before noon, to be on time to class, to smile at a stranger, to write a bloody sentence, to not be a bumbling American idiot in front of the Sainsbury’s cashiers, etc.).

Sometimes she thought about her family, about how much she missed her Mom’s dinners and hugs and lists, in that order, and her Dad’s stories: the conviction in his voice whenever he told them. She caught herself from time to time, whenever she was reading out loud, trying to emulate the dips and dives, the sincerity in every syllable that she’d learned from him. She missed her sister, but over their years apart she’d become easier to miss. Not because she loved her less or missed her less, but because her heart had grown used to being physically separated from the person who understood her best.

Tonight, she was thinking about the city. She was thinking about the cobblestones under her feet. She was thinking about how much lovelier the streets would be if the trees were burning like they did back home. Nonetheless, she loved them.

It was this sense of singularity that catalyzed the process. She never loved anything before she left it. Or at least, she could never recognize it for the love that it was. But when she returned from a short weekend trip, just days ago as the cold was settling over the city, she felt a sense of returning to somewhere near to feeling like home. As she walked and reacquainted herself, she found she had missed the hills they liked to call streets (always uphill, remarkably). Her ears had grown accustomed to the cold; the frost had restored her to the former snow enthusiast she was, before DC winters eroded that version of herself away.

Once she let herself love bits and pieces, the rest came in a rush: The effortless combination of modern and medieval buildings; the way the sunshine scared away the cold as soon as it came out from behind the clouds; the way people could never make up their mind about which side of the sidewalk to walk on. This usually would drive her insane, but here she was just as confused as the rest of them and had come to love the little side step shuffle dance with strangers. They were always kind, shouting ‘cheers’ after her when they finally managed to brush past.  Even the homeless were extremely polite, despite if she could spare them any change. Plus, many of them had dogs. She liked the idea that a sense of companionship could make someone so many degrees warmer, even when they had many reasons (including the weather) to be cold.

“I need to buy a scarf”, she thought, if only to get the damn weather off her mind.

But the universe had different plans for that evening, and as she reached the Quartermile, it began to rain. She did love the rain, though there never had been a solution for her hair in such circumstances. Umbrella’s weren’t the answer, since the rain didn’t fall, but rather formed a ball of mist around her as she strode on.

As she did, she passed two other girls who hadn’t yet hung up their leather jackets for the season, and she felt better about holding out hope for a few more sunny late summer days, even as mid-October charged in head on at her full force.

She crossed the Meadows, noting for the millionth time (probably) that the scene from the Wizard of Oz with the scary apple trees could probably have been inspired by the very path she had to walk each night. She decided this place was a lot like Oz, everything either grand or green, as long as you substituted munchkins for folks on bikes.

She was nearing the end of the paved path now, preparing her ankles to take on the cobblestone in heels for the last time today. Her flat was only 3 more minutes’ walk, but she hadn’t quite finished her thinking for the night.  Unsure, really, of what she was thinking around, it didn’t much matter. She knew the moment she opened the door the fluorescent lights would scare away any ideas like flashlights in a bat cave.

She did love her flat. It had beautiful arches in the doorway, a meticulously tiled floor foyer and a smart vestibule that kept out that damned chill in the air. Her door was large and wooden, carved with care (and symmetrically, which was more important). It possessed a big golden 3 in the center, and a knocker beneath. The knocker was next to useless, because directly behind the door was a staircase that took you up two levels to the kitchen, and another two to the bedrooms. You wouldn’t be heard unless you buzzed up, and even then there was still a slight chance.

Anyway, it was this time of night that all her flat mates were home, buzzing about in preparation for their tomorrows’ as well. They were kind people. Well intentioned, respectful. She even considered one a friend. But it was nothing like coming home. Her room was her safe haven from the world, as it had been her whole life. But she liked open windows and open doors in her home. Leaving just the window open, without the neutralization of the hallway air, was proving to complicate the perfect balance between the biting wind and the burning (ancient) radiator that lined her eastern wall.

Behind that marvelous wooden door there were many good things: the first kitchen of her very own with left over mashed potatoes in the fridge; Magnum chocolate peanut butter ice cream bars in the freezer; a bottle of her favorite wine, unopened; in her room, her quilt, which remained as well traveled as she was, and freshly washed linens lay snugly tugged around her bed. But all the fresh blankets and ice cream in the world wouldn’t make up for what was lacking; the warm welcomes, the comfortable intimacy that comes with living with loved ones, family and friends alike. The sense of being home, on a smaller scale. Being so familiar with a person, you can identify who has come home by the sound of their footsteps or the jingle of their keys; knowing how their day has gone by the playlist that has begun to waft out from under their door.

And so, that’s what she finally found herself thinking about as she rounded the corner of her block. Gazing up to the second story, she caught shadows flickering in the candle light in the kitchen’s giant wooden windows (another thing she absolutely adored). But as she neared the gate, she kept her eyes steady on to the next building.

She thought she would go for a few more blocks, maybe find a few more scary apple trees to paint with burning browns in her mind. Putting a few more minutes of cobblestone under her feet, she held onto the well-nigh feeling of home they gave her. Maybe when she got back she would sit down and try to figure out her bloody radiator. Her room would be far too stuffy with both the door and window shut, which lately had been more and more frequently the case. If the cold really were settling in, it didn’t leave her much time to find that illusive balance.

       “Yes, that’s a good plan for tomorrow”, she thought. But tonight, she would take the long way home.

For Dust You Are And To Dust You Will Return

I've stayed quiet until now. I have the tendency to refrain from writing anything until I am very certain, in fear that I will regret my words and change my mind. I wait until I have sorted out my thoughts before I bring the pen to paper, the finger to the key: I need to be certain of my truth before I share it with the world.

But I'm left uncertain of everything I once believed to be true. I'm left shaken down to my very core; I no longer know how to move forward.

I spent all day Sunday curled into the fetal position in my bed, endlessly scrolling through my social media, trying to somehow convince myself it was real; that hate so strong could still beat in the pulse of American society. I couldn't wrap my head around the news, I still can't, honestly. I know you're going to say that is self-centered, imagine how the families of those directly affected feel, and you're right. 

But if I can confess to anything here, and this speaks volumes about the generation I am a part of, and the senseless violence we have grown up accustomed to, it's this: I've grown numb. From Virginia Tech to Sandy Hook to Santa Barbara and the countless shootings in between, I've become used to it. Mass shootings no longer shock me. Somedays they go hardly reported and possibly unnoticed, lost between tweets and finstagram posts and snap streaks and everything else. 

Sunday, for the first time since I can remember, the pain cut through this shell I've grown. As I lay there, unable to bring myself to do anything at all, silent tears fell from my eyes as I read article after article about the senselessness and violence that has left us here, in the wake of the deadliest massacre in American history, at the hands of someone who had hate in his heart for other human beings, other beating hearts, other blinking eyes and breathing chests. 

I've always considered myself an ally to the LGBTQ+ community, though I'm not sure I've always taken as much action as I could have. But equality was never a question in my mind: love is love, humans are humans, my air is no more important than yours. If there's anything I took away from my years of attending Catholic Mass it's that we are born from dust and to dust we shall return. All of us. This is fact. 

But I was never close to it. Issues this big were never capable of making me feel so small. I have always put my whole hearted trust in humanity, in goodness, in my faith that love and happiness and fairness will prevail, no matter how much evil challenges it along the way. I knew homophobia existed, but firmly believed that acceptance and support greatly outweighed this baseless and hateful belief. Now, I'm not so sure. 

4 months ago, the most proudly gay 5' nothing spitfire of a girl walked into my life and changed it for the better, forever. She has become someone I can count on, someone who counts on me, someone I laugh with, cry with, and can't wait to share memories with for the rest of my life. She's not just my little, but she's become one of my best friends. 

And I've never felt so helpless. How can there be people who wish her ill, this incredibly talented and smart person? How could you ever wish harm or death on anyone, let alone a person or AN ENTIRE GROUP OF PEOPLE you don't even know? How is there nothing I can do to make this better? 

Worst of all, what can we do? What can I do to get through to these people? What can I say, write, preach, scream to get them to understand that humanity is qualified by nothing more than a beating heart? I've never felt more like a pinpoint on the universe, completely incapable of doing anything at all. I've never felt more uselessly singularly here, biding my time until the violence finally reaches me. 

Here in my safe, privileged bubble, I'm drowning. Every window I look out of, I see violence and bigotry and hate and ignorance that leads to more hate. I see a world I don't want to raise kids in. I see my future, but in this future everyone I love who isn't straight and white and Christian is suffering under the oppression that I try and try to lift from their shoulders, but never succeed. 

How much longer can we keep up the fight? How much more suffering must the citizenry, conscious and uncomfortable with the state of our nation, endure while we push for reform and Revolution and progress, before we're crushed under the weight of the world we are trying to advance forward? 

If the second amendment of the Constitution is so important, please let's review the very first sentence, and what it calls for: 

"We the People, of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."

Justice. Tranquility. General Welfare. Blessings of Liberty. 

Now show me what part of today's America represents that one; the one that the Founding Fathers poured their hearts and souls into forging for us. Now I may be a liberal, but I'm fairly certain if George Washington and Benjamin Franklin rose from their graves and saw that the only one of their values we still hold dear is the right to bear arms, they would willingly return deep, deep, deep into the Earth and never come back up for air. 

And so I wonder, will this ever end? Will we ever know America: Land of the free, home of the brave? Or will we remain forever America: land of bigotry, home of hate, flying a bullet-spangled banner perpetually at half mast in memory of lives that needn't be lost? 

I Desperately Want To Title This Anything Other Than "Little Moments".

Everywhere I look, people keep telling me to show up to write. Every book I read for class, every acquaintance I catch up with in passing, and every thought that flashes through my head. Somewhere between last December, when I first decided to do this on a whim in the foreign yet familiar Panera around the corner from my sister's Boston apartment, and now, I settled on only writing an entry when something momentous happened or when something felt over or learned or gained or gone.

I think this is because I don't know how to write about being happy. I've been waiting and waiting and biding my time until my life shatters, leaving me a million pieces and a lesson to write about. But, and don't get me wrong this is a good thing, the tragedy just doesn't seem like its coming anytime soon.

My life is full of little moments: small milliseconds in time that eventually build up to this person I have slowly and indelibly become. So while the big things, like the semester ending and turning 20 (and it being the best, most ordinary and cherished day of my life), and quitting the Odyssey and The Rival being my savior and all these things that seem like they deserve a post to them self have happened, and honestly probably do deserve attention of their own, I am deciding finally to move away from this life of big things.

After all, it is the tiny things that matter most to me. When I can make an Uber driver smile after his last customer yelled at him for the traffic he simply couldn't control, and when he makes me smile in return by thanking me for being a decent human being. When talking on the phone with my parents through a 3 mile walk in the cold makes everything just fine, including the loss of feeling in my toes, and the shattered computer screen slung over my shoulder. It's when waking up too early reminds me why I love winter mornings and finding the perfect gift for my sister's birthday reminds me what's important.

As much as I try, sometimes I feel like the only thing I'm grounded in is my own unreality. This perfect bubble of friendship and happiness and financial instability that is mostly fake (because I still have a roof over my head and meal swipes to spend) leaves me blissful most days and guilty the rest. And the days when I'm guilty, the voice inside my head urges me to show up to write even more.

My dad sent me an e-mail last semester that hit home pretty hard; so much so that it both urges me on everyday and stalls my thoughts before they have the chance to strike a key. It essentially told me not to waste this thing I have. That holds a lot of weight to me. The inner monologue I keep with myself is apparently a big hit amongst you all, if you've stayed with me this far. Which is fine and great and I sincerely appreciate the support.

So here's the thing that terrifies me. Here's the thing that makes this really hard. I'm still young, and I'm still dreaming. I tell everyone I want to be a book editor, and I seriously do, but I would be lying to myself and everyone else if I didn't say my first dream is to write. And to do so well, and to make an impact, and, optimistically, do it for a living. But what happens when I publish this and expectations are set, and I don't meet them and then to everyone I've ever known I'm just the wannabe who never made it? This isn't the life for me. I don't handle failure well. Even when I am failing, I am succeeding by turning it into a funny story or a story of perseverance at the very least.

One of my fondest memories, and I'm sure you'll all question my sanity once you're done hearing this, it of my 18th birthday when my family made me cry in the middle of my favorite Italian restaurant. The conversation started with the whole 'you're an adult now' celebratory few sentences and ended with 'what are your goals? Plans for the future?'

Those of you who only met me in college have to understand the emotional and vulnerable person I now am grew out of this exact moment. I used to be the angsty high schooler who spent her days on Tumblr. I didn't really talk about my emotions or goals or life. I was just kind of there, living my day to day life. It was in that moment when my parents and sister sat there, staring at me, I burst into tears. Because not only did I feel the pressure of answering them, but how sad it was that the three people closest to me in this world did not know what I dreamed of accomplishing in my time here. That was the moment in which I decided to write, to open myself up not only to my own self, but to be vulnerable for the first time and let the world see what runs through my head.

Born from that moment is, fundamentally, the person I define myself as today. But that person is ever-changing, despite the big moments. They really don't mean that much anymore, those moments, simple markers that indicate time is passing, far too rapidly, and that I need to show up and write about the mundane, the day to day. Because after all, if I show up to live the little moments and write about them later, I think I could possibly keep this fleeting perfect sphere of happiness in my grasp just a little longer.

So take this as my vow. This post, inspired by a little moment. Take this as my vow to show up and write about the little things, the ones that leave me walking the quad with a smile in my heart and glimmer in my eye. Take this sentence as my promise that I will break that vow, but I will do my very very best.  In return, I ask that you answer me this.

Are you content, in this very moment?

I have $16.34 to my name. I have a shattered computer screen, an unbalanced diet, a deep affection for Barefoot Pink Moscato, a slight caffeine dependency. I have an urge to write, something that every parent prays their kid will never realize (in fears of a life spent pursuing art and racking up the credit card bills). But I'm happy. Freshii has had quinoa the past two times I've eaten there and my laundry is a greater percent clean than dirty. It's Birks season! And I've finally mastered the all-nighter formula! I have a best friend who could fill the trope in every bad rom-com that left you envious when you were a kid, good people around me who give nothing but support and love, and the cutest damn cat in the world to go home to.

I have the little moments, and I'm happy with those.

Roots

There’s stuff I learned this summer that I could probably spend a few paragraphs talking about, but at this point I’ve forgotten all about Enterprise and moved on to the other issues this summer presented. The most important being my first broken heart. 

     My first broken heart did not derive in the way most do, because I have never been and do not plan on being in love anytime soon (Problem #1: Boys are a tricky creature and Problem #2: Vulnerability just doesn’t sound like something I would be into). My first broken heart accompanied my realization that my childhood best friends and I have fallen out of best friendship.  It hit me in the shower one morning, after the last night I slept over at Carrie’s. Something felt off the whole time, but nothing was out of place. A cloud of nostalgia was engulfing my conscious and I was loosing my ability to think clearly about my life, as I do when I think too hard, too much, and too often. I was in the shower when it hit me, and I’ve never sobbed harder in my life.

     There is something so fragile about friendships. In the way that they are strong and hard and undeniably reliable, they are also built on trust and time and hope that when we say forever, we mean it. Mine were built on pre-k rugs, on performance hall stages, and on softball diamonds. And after a while, they were built merely on the years that had come before. But I’ve learned that mutual experiences are only strong enough to seal a bond when they remain the only experiences. An air-tight sort of ordeal.

     I thought nothing could weaken a 14-year friendship. I genuinely thought that we would four-way Skype everyday and text each other everything and meet all each other’s new friends. That’s on me. Somewhere in the middle of new friends and frat basements or between college course work and a part-time job, I lost touch. I hardly called home and I never texted. I don’t even know my Skype password anymore. We grew apart, and I for that I take full responsibility.    

     But as we grew apart, we grew up and we grew into the people we are supposed to be. We found the new people who will break our hearts as we leave them for the next stage of our life. Perhaps we have found the city we will call home for the rest of our life, or we have developed a passion for something we never saw before. It doesn’t matter in which way this growth took us, it just matters that we have grown.  Up and away from the roots that once bound us so close together, we couldn’t see the world we don’t all share rapidly approaching.

      It’s natural. It’s totally natural that we have grown apart and become close with the people we see and talk to everyday. The people we live with. The people who we now have shared experiences with. These are the people who we will introduce our parents to and the ones we will list as our emergency contacts in the years to come. But as much as these people have learned about me, they will never know baby Brenna. They will never begin to understand what I miss so deeply about home. They’ll never watch the sunset at Thatcher or understand just how amazing of a teacher Mr. Guilfoyle was. They will never know the back roads of my neighborhood, and they will never sit on the Middle School lawn on a Saturday morning while we eat blueberry scones and breakfast sandwiches.

     More than the what, it's the who that made me who I am. When I replay the memory reel in my head, they are always there with me. From my earliest memories of dance and softball to the moments before the van drove away for DC. 

     I can single out specific traits and behaviors that I inherited from my parents, specific ways I view the world because my sister viewed them first, the ways in which my college friends have influenced me, even the things that friends I met in high school managed to rub off on me. I cannot identify these things as a result of my childhood best friends. That is how engrained they are in me. We ‘ve been inseparable since I was four, and as a result the ways in which they influenced me are inseparable from the things I find innately my own.  I know for a fact that I would not be who I am today if I did not grow up with those three girls.

     Roots run deep. I am not ignorant of this. But trunks grow pretty damn tall, too. We are not the same, and we will never be the same as we were when our whole world was our little hometown. 

     So we’ve grown apart. We have come into our own and left our high school selves to settle in dust within the yearbook pages. And I don’t know how to end this, because I don’t want it to seem like an ending. I want it to seem like an acceptance. Because I can’t be the only one who felt that heavy pressure, and I can’t be the only one who has been struggling to make sense of the crushing feeling in the pit of my stomach, and I can’t be the only one who misses the people we used to be while simultaneously loving who we have become. This is me coming to terms with the death of a friendship and a life as I knew it, and becoming comfortable with what that means for us moving forward. With me knowing that we may not speak for weeks, even months, at a time. With me knowing that there is someone else in your life who makes you laugh with their ridiculous antics, who listens to Lady Antebellum with you when you’re sad, and who engages you in heated political debates.  And respectfully forces you to listen to her new playlist in the car. That makes it sound like a breakup, but I know it’s not. Because part of me coming to terms with this new kind of long distance, is me knowing that no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I will always have you three in my heart. Because roots run deep, and ours are forever intertwined. 

Change Over Time

     I like my hometown. I really do, I swear. I'm just not overly attached to it. You would think I would be. No place else had ever been home until I went away to school, but no. For as long as I can remember I had sworn off being one of those people who comes back after college. I have no good reason except that I decided it once and it's just never really appealed to me to prolong my time here.  I've slept in the same twin-size been since I outgrew my crib, I've driven along the same roads from my car seat years until I was the one behind the wheel. I could draw you a map of where everything is in Wal-Mart and Hannaford, and let you know which Dunkin is the fastest en route from one end of town to the other. I used to know everything about this place like the back of my hand.
      Spending a year away has made evident just how quickly things can change. There's at least 5 new stores in the mall that I didn't know about. They're building a Taco Bell across from Wendy's and there's a weird elevated square in the middle of the Marshall's parking lot. The library, my library, doesn't use stamp cards anymore for return dates. They switched to receipts - receipts! I was raised on stamp cards. I used to look at the due dates that preceded mine and try to make up stories as to why the person 3 before me returned the book so fast it could be taken out two days later. Was it good? Was it terrible? Did they have to suddenly leave the country? Where did they flee to? What was their crime? It was a fun game. Anyway. Change doesn't bother me. Change is healthy.  It's a sign of life; pulsating progress that moves us to where we should be. I'm all for it. What does bother me is what I didn't realize until I came back: the fact that it can do so without me here.
        When we leave a place, we hold it in our minds as our fondest memories depict it. Our memories don't show us the life that remains here as ours continue elsewhere. We expect that when we return, things will be just as we left them. We don't imagine our most influential teachers have found new pupils to mold. We don't think about how our parents might have settled into a quiet routine that is blissfully free of our shoes in the middle of the kitchen and our dirty dishes in the sink. I never fathomed that the place I hold dearest, the place that has built a rough foundation for the person I have become, would substitute the thick, ink filled manilla slips that provide so much character with flimsy little paper receipts destined for the nearest recycling bin. I was raised here. It's the only world I have ever known. It's my world. My streets, my stores, my high school, my mall, my thruway exit, my neighborhood. All mine.
   
     It is equal parts hurtful and humbling to realize that the people and places so integral to my childhood can carry on so successfully in my absence. I am not this town's world, though it may once have been mine. I'm just another car, another girl, another heartbeat who contributes to the pulsating progress every time she drives away.

The First Year

      It's impossible to know how you have changed without a means of comparison. I mean, you can feel it within yourself, but it cannot be outwardly expressed. You can say you've matured, that you are an adult, that you are more responsible, but in the end it is our actions that determine whether or not this is true.
      I'm a pretty careless driver. I have been since October 1st, 2013 - the day I got my license and discovered freedom. There is no feeling that compares to the first time you drive without a parent or legal driver over the age of 21 in the passenger seat next to you. You are totally in control. You pick the music, the volume, the speed, the direction. All of the power is in your hands. At 16, this realization is the most exciting thing since push-up bras. At 19, it's utterly daunting.
       I've been stewing and thinking and starting and stopping trying to figure out how I am going to articulate to the world what my first year of college was: it took me going on an ice cream run to Stewart's last night to understand for myself.  My first year of college was the slow destruction of my lead foot.  And man did I ever have a lead foot. I never sped intentionally, but I was just prone to putting a little too much pressure on the pedal. Like I said, lead foot. But yesterday I was driving home, a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream riding shot gun, when I got to the hill before my house that I rarely, if ever, drove the speed limit on in high school. It's a HUGE hill, can you blame me?  Usually about half way down I give a quick glance to the speedometer just to make sure I'm not breaking any records or leaving skid marks behind me, and when I did, I was surprised to find that I was going the speed limit. Even more surprised to realize this is not the first time I have noticed this since being home. And then all the fragments of this past year that I have saved as drafts and half written stories came together. This past year had changed something so close to my core that I no longer have a lead foot. Me, lead-footless! It made me less reckless, it gave me goals, it tore down my walls and taught me to communicate with the people I love. It taught me to register the fact that I love people, and they, me.
      This past year grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and forced me to grow up. From the very first night, when my roommate and I awkwardly approached two other girls and gently bullied them into being our friends by making them share their frisbee full of home fries with us because I thought I was going to be friendless, to the first week when I had to get a job all on my own without any connections or references, to the third month when I missed my parents so much it made my gut hurt and I teared up nearly every time I talked to them. I learned that I owe every part of me who ever did anything right and well to them, and that I take them far too for granted. But I never wanted to be the girl that was homesick, and I wasn't homesick - I've never been homesick. My home is where the people I love are. It's hard to miss a place that is scattered across the country, occasionally the world.  Life is about people. This I have learned.
       I found my people this year. I found them asleep four feet away from me, at midnight breakfasts, in elevators, in t-shirts of my favorite bands, in coffee shops, in recruitment shirts, and on the streets of Tenleytown at 3am. These are the people that I surround myself with, every waking moment. These are the people I so badly did not want to leave two weeks ago. They are the reason I will go back.
       They make me laugh until I cry, they know my coffee order, they laugh at my bad jokes, they accept me for my lack of cleanliness and my inability to care for dairy products. They have assessed the severity of my financial incompetence and chosen to keep me around any way. They give me hell and make me want to tear my eyelashes off sometimes, but they make me rational and real. They pull me out of my head: they make me a better person. They give me a reason to go the speed limit.
      When it hit me this year that all of the power was in my hands, I was far less excited than I was three years ago. I wanted to crawl into a hole, burn all documentation that said I was over 18, and call my parents. But at some point I registered a fact that I had always known; there were people in this world, people in my classes, who had been making their own adult decisions since they were 14, some younger. I knew that if they were fine, I would be too.  I saw that I had all the tools I needed to be responsible, I just had to put them into effect. I looked around at my people, how out of sync I had fallen, how off balance I felt. I pulled myself together, pulled my GPA back to it's minimum requirement, and pulled myself back to the center.
        After my first semester, I was too comfortable. I was so confident and so, so happy. I thought that I had found myself, so I didn't need to look anywhere else. Turns out the only place I was looking up my ass, because that's where my head was. It is important to be happy with yourself, and I still am so happy believe me, but life is about people. This is the thing that really forced me to grow up. Life is about people. The people who matter, the ones I don't want to lose. It's about my parents-  living a life that will have my mom telling all her friends about my latest news and doing so in a way that will make my dad proud, in that better-when-it's-hand-written-than-said kind of way. I need to work hard so that I can make enough money to buy my sister the boat I promised her so we can actually spend quality time together as adults (or fake adults because we're never growing up, right?). It's about the friends who stand by while you flounder a bit, but accept you right back when you think you've figured it all out again. If you have anyone, or anything at all that keeps you grounded, don't you dare take it for granted.
   
       Life is about the people who reach deep into your core, and over the course of a few months, a year, a lifetime, chip and corrode and corrupt and deteriorate and destroy your inherent lead foot. My first year of college not only taught me this, but to let them.    
   
   

An Adventurer's Soul

So I submitted a piece to a small annual magazine that has to do with a small lake in Northern New York-- and it's being published! It's not a huge deal because it's a very small publication but I'm very excited and I wanted to share my piece. So here it is:

An Adventurer’s Soul

By Brenna Raffe

The first time I read The Boxcar Children I was in 1^st grade. While everyone else was reading Henry and Mudge and swinging on the tire swing, I was falling madly in love with the idea of living in the woods; of using a nook behind a waterfall as a refrigerator and of cooking dinner on the open fire. And now here I am; living in a city, surrounded by cars and people, where the closest thing to ‘getting back to nature’ I can come is walking the unattended, overgrown pathway that cuts between some apartment buildings. This is where I’ve found myself. Sometimes I feel trapped and sometimes I think if I got any happier my heart might burst. Everything is fleeting.  This, I think, is the burden of longing for adventure.

I’ve never been sure if an adventurer’s soul is born or made, but either way, I’ve always know I have one. Having been born and raised in the same not-that-small-but-small-enough suburban hometown, I never doubted for a moment that there was something greater beyond those town lines, state lines, or even country borders. I crave discovery. But it never used to be for anything overly grand like it is now. It used to be for the simple discovery of the island in the middle of the lake that seemed impossibly far away or the desire to save an earthworm from its impeding doom on the asphalt road; to climb a boulder twice my height and see for miles or to walk out to where the water drops off all by myself.

            As far back as I can remember my family has spent time each summer at Uncle Joe and Aunt Sue’s lake house. It’s more of a cabin, really. Forest colored and lined in full with wood paneling that reverberates the joyous noise of reunion, of family, of summer, of lives being lived. It’s got a bona fide residential attic that stored most of our duffle bags, complete with guest rooms separated by hanging sheets. We ate most of our meals on the screened in porch, listening to the loons call to each other and taking in the view.  Inside, there’s a chill that the fireplace can never quite beat, and a hammock stung up between two pines paralleling the drive.  It sits on hill that once seemed like a mountain and if you let your legs succumb to gravity when you ran down it, there’s just enough lawn to stop before the road. My sister and I used to race down it.* We used to do a lot of things together at the lake. We still do a lot of things together. But as all the kids got older, our time became limited. Weekends were spent on basketball courts and in hotel rooms rather than in the water and around a campfire.

            In those weekends, before time became a commodity highly sought after, I discovered my adventurer’s soul. I found her in the dirt we used to play in and the holes we used to dig in the sand; I found her while we watched the night become illuminated by the ring of bon fires on the 4^th.  She was there as I fell asleep in my dad’s arms watching the fireworks, willing myself not to be scared by the loud booms, but to take comfort in the arms wrapped around me and the way the reverberations kind of made my ribs tickle instead. I found her at the camp store under the lift lid freezer right next to the ice cream and on the road next to me the first time I got to walk down the road and over the bridge without the adults. I found her rocking me in the hammock so hard it flipped over and pushing me the final way on our hike up to the fire tower, straining for the view and the sense of accomplishment. I found her on the boat ride to the island, giddy to explore something new. She hid in between the sparse pines and all around the moss-covered boulders I so boldly used as my playground. She became the voice inside me that, even when my mother told me to be careful, that what I was doing was dangerous, let’s me know I’ll be ok in the end. She taught me to trust myself more than anyone else. In my short 19 years, she’s become my best friend, my most trusted advisor, and often times the one who pushes me to go for whatever crazy plan I’ve conjured up.  She’s the reason I’ve written this, the reason I write at all.

            So I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you Canada Lake for giving the loons a place to live and me a place to wander. Thank you for being a community of adventurer’s souls and fostering one in me. Thank you for giving me somewhere to run wild and free and giving me a sense of what coming together really looks like. Thank you for being the backdrop to reunions that proved strong friendships can’t be broken and for teaching me thunderstorms are breathtakingly beautiful rather than ferocious and frightening. Thank you for the inspiration for the setting of the novel I may never write. Thank you for the ice cream. But most importantly, thank you for the memories. If I ever get so fed up with the world enough to fulfill my childhood fantasy of living in an abandoned boxcar, look for me first on the island. There’s no place I’d rather be. 

                       

* At least I think we did. She says I make up most of my memories. I think my soul knew I wanted to be a writer before my mind did, and it did me a favor and filed away the small, seemingly inconsequential moments so I would have them to write about later.