A Love Letter

I used to cry on almost every returning flight after a trip. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone that. I remember the last time I left Italy, I cried so hard on the plane, before even taking off. And it wasn’t a small tear shed about having to go home after a magical three weeks traversing the country alone. It was a deep, hard, ugly cry. They spilled out of me along with the aching feeling that I was making a terrible mistake. Like I was watching myself make the wrong decision and I could feel it in my bones but I was frozen and forced to watch it play out. I actually considered trying to get off the plane. Acting out some cliche’ movie scene where I start begging the flight attendants to open the doors and let me off so I could reunite with a lost lover I realized I was stupid for ever having left. But there was no one on the other side of the plane doors. Just the opposite. I had to keep getting on the plane home. Because now I sit here, on a torturously long layover in the Montreal airport, eager to reunite with the family I have created. Every flight home brought me to them. It’s different, this sensation, and layered. It feels like there is an echo of vulnerability reverberating from a younger Sarah somewhere inside me. The version of me that wanted to never long for another person, never again attached and susceptible to the heart ache that plagued her. There’s a peace and contentment to boarding a flight without a pit in my stomach and a catch in my throat. There is a pride because the family I have created, it is not anything that younger Sarah could have ever envisioned. If she had, she would have shed many less tears returning home, knowing she was staying in her hometown not forever but just long enough to meet him. The one who would not just accept her independent spirit but would fall in love with that very thing, the very thing she loved most about herself. It will never cease to amaze me and never cease to be the thing that validates my trust in the laughable cosmic workings of the universe, that he fell in love with the piece of me that doesn’t invite him on adventures. The piece of me that goes to dinner without him. The piece of me that can be almost annoying detached out of old habit and that a less secure man would flinch at. Trust me, he is my adventure buddy. If there is someone I'm bringing, it is him. And if I'm flying solo, he is waiting at the door to kiss me goodbye and make sure I have everything I need. It is hard to put into words, it is hard for me to wrap my mind around, he feels too good to be true. I knew I would find someone that accepted I would always be traveling alone, really because I'm stubborn and I was never going to stop and they would just have to be okay with it. But to hear him say how proud he was to brag to his friends that I was on this trip alone, it feels like a god damn glitch to be honest. A beautiful, sexy, glitch. There is no quicker way to a travelers heart. And no better validation that I was meant to take every flight home. To return again and again. Perhaps that sensation in my stomach, that catch in my throat, was not my body trying to tell me I was making a mistake by coming home. Maybe it was me getting one step closer to him every time.