smile

I was driving the other day, following the meandering, winding country roads so typical and classic of New England. Burnt orange and brown leaves fluttered and danced from the sky, catching a sudden breeze and hurled across the hood of my car. The nearly naked trees clutching onto the last remnants of fall stretched their twisted branches across the pavement, a majestic and yet eerie tunnel, the promise of winter lurking. Embracing these last vestiges of my favorite season, a realization dawned on me... Only one year ago this same time, I was driving these same roads with my little car, boxes and bubble wrap - hoarding what could fit of my whole life - stacked to the ceiling. I was returning... I was leaving... I was beginning and ending.

One year ago... Can it really be so short, and yet so long? Contain so many fragile memories, so many bruises and smiles? So much change that I look back on that person in that car and wonder how she can be so different, but so much the same, so much better. Suddenly, inexplicably, I found myself no longer looking back, no longer longing for what was left behind, no longer reaching out desperately for what I'd forced myself to walk away from.

One year ago, I had no direction. No answers to the numerous questions that plagued my every thought and action. No expectations. No promises. Just the present. As though the world reversed its rotation, my whole life has suddenly spun into a resevoir of dreams, of hopes, of determination, of inexplicable joy and contentment. A resevoir flooded by the rush of random experiences, determined choices, and abrupt decisions. A list of disconnected occurrences lined up next to each other like dominoes suddenly collide in perfect hindsight to fall into place like pieces of a puzzle to create an image, a view of what it was all meant for.

In a peaceful moment of incandescent clarity on a back road, the realization descended that this time -this year- was meant for just this. And suddenly a future, a forever and always, that I cannot wait to embrace and charge into awaits me with unbidden arms... And I smile.