About a year ago I was invited to go skydiving with a friend of mine. My first thought was, “Hell no, I don’t want to go skydiving! That sounds terrifying.” But then I started thinking about it. After a few days I realized, “I need to throw myself out of an airplane.” When my dad got home that evening I invited him into the office where I had found the song that played on his skydiving video from ten years before.
As ‘free fallin’ played in the background, I said, “Dad, I am going skydiving tomorrow.” His reaction was not what I expected at all. He was upset and rigid in his decision that I would NOT be going skydiving the next day. It turned into a huge fight. I yelled like a lunatic, something I am ashamed to admit, but in doing so I realized why I wanted to jump out of an airplane so badly. I didn’t even know what I was feeling deep down inside until the words had come out of my mouth. “I feel like I live in a prison here. I can’t breathe, I’m suffocating.”
To be fair to my parents, they had by no means created an insufferable environment. I was allowed extreme freedom along with love and support for the majority of my wildest dreams! However, the need to free myself or find myself, all on my own, whether that meant jumping out of an airplane or moving to another state was perfectly apparent now.
I have been gone for almost six months. I moved to live closer to my sister and get away from everything and everyone that was all too familiar to me. It worked too. I feel that I did set myself free. And in the process learned about who I am and grew into myself.
I move home in a week. It’s all over now. I can’t believe it happened so fast. Now I am leaving my new friends and my sister behind. But it isn’t just that these last six months have come and gone like night and day. I turn on the TV and all of my favorite shows growing up are old. The clothes they wear are hilariously out of style, some of the slang they use is funny and sadly, some of the magic that existed in the heartfelt stories seems lost in families today. All of the children in those shows have grown to be adults.
I’m an adult.
I fought with my sister today. Just putting that in writing puts a sting in my eyes and an ache in my throat. She said she wasn’t going to my cousins wedding. When I got upset she became defensive. She said that she is, “tired of bearing the “sin” of moving away from home.” The truth is, no one blames her for breaking up the family when she moved. Nothing could ever come between us. We are blood. We have always said that and it’s still true. No matter what happens or how far apart we are, nothing can change our blood.
The fact is, she was right and I was wrong.
I am upset because I can’t stop a moving train. I can’t make life slow down and our family from growing up and growing apart. We aren’t all ten years old anymore camping in the Tetons. We have our own lives and responsibilities. And all of the tears in my body won’t change time.
If you offered me a time machine and said, “Go back. Choose a day from your childhood and go there, live it again, minute by minute.” I wouldn’t go. Does that seem contradictory? Yes. That is what is so insane about time. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to be there now. It’s just sad to see it end.
In life there is more death than that of a human body. We mourn the loss of companions, but what about the losses we never talk about? What about the day you realized playing with dolls or trucks was stupid. What about the day you stopped believing in pretend? What about the first day of Kindergarten or the last day of staying at home with mom? What about the last night in your parent’s house? Or the day that you move? What about the day that you realize that your sister isn’t just your big sister anymore, but a woman with a career, husband and life of her own?
Sometimes when I think about my future I imagine me in a white sports car, a nice flat in the city, a closet full of fabulous shoes and a great career. And that seems alright for me. That puts a smile on my face. But when I look into the past at the things that put a smile on my face, I think of knocking on the door of the back deck of my old house covered in sand from head to toe, sand matted into the dreads that were once my hair, the sandbox completely remodeled with a castle and a moat and my mom spraying me off with the hose before I could even imagine coming in. I think about wrapping myself around my dad’s leg and sitting on his foot while he walked around the house or hiding behind the door of the garage when he got home from work to jump out and scare him. I think about getting in my brother’s bed when I had a nightmare. I think about my sister playing the piano or waking up to her famous orange smoothie. I think about all of us in Hawaii together on the beach. Or the time they all came to California to see me get my black belt. They all came, not just one parent, the whole family. And they were all so kind and supportive.
There is no man made material possession that can replace your family.
There is simply nothing more valuable than that love.
And if there is one thing time can’t change, it’s love.
