Twenty~Five

I woke up this morning and I was alone. I walked into the kitchen, where normally your faces would be waiting for me. Faces I will never erase. Faces I woke up to every morning for 10 short months. It's difficult to describe the emotions this goodbye brought for me, and at this very moment i feel kind of numb to it. But when I was laying there on the floor with Jon during our last hour, watching the strips of flickering daylight fade from the walls of his mom's rented apartment, I felt like I was getting stabbed in the gut. He held me while I cried and drooled all over him for at least the fourth time this week. I looked back at Keeley the moment we got to the airport to drop me off. Tears were streaming down her face and I thought to myself, "how is it possible I've found so much love here?" I'm so deeply sad that this chapter of my life is over. I fell completely in love with a group of people and let them become my world for a while, and i will never forget...

The thought of Americorps ending in less than two weeks makes my stomach sink to the ground. Ten months. Ten months of endless inconsistency, moving a billion times, eating food off the floor and wearing the same clothes seven days in a row. My standards have been significantly lowered, for sure, but my expectations have been exceeded beyond my wildest dreams. It may seem unbelievable to compare this program to a dream, after the bed bugs and moldy walls and baling cardboard for 8 hours straight and some *very* difficult people. But I've discovered that if you do the most mundane tasks in the world with people you love, they can easily transform into bliss. And I learned that any difficult person that makes you feel tiny and worthless can be buffered by someone who sees the entire world in you. I've been so lucky this year to find people who see that in me. I see a world of love around me everyday, my life is painted with gratitude where a little more cynicism used to be. ...