All of high school I was told: "don't blink or you'll miss it...this is going to pass in the blink of an eye." Well, whoever let those cliches out into the world was nothing short of spot on. If high school was the blink of an eye, senior year was that weird little half blink we do when there's dust resting on our waterline.
Sometimes life has the capability of moving quickly when in reality we feel like we’re watching it play out in slow motion. When I was in the middle of my junior year of high school my dad changed jobs and had to work primarily on the west coast. This transfer meant that I went through my entire senior year of high school knowing that when it came to an end I was picking up and leaving my sweet Georgia small town for Chandler, Arizona. Last Tuesday I woke up to an empty house.
My parents were at the closing on our Georgia home that has raised me these past 8 years. I rushed to curl my hair and do my makeup so that I would be ready to let the packers in. In a whirlwind, I showed the packers around and my parents came home. A car horn beeped outside and I grabbed my cap and gown - surprise last Tuesday was also the day I graduated high school. I jumped in my best friends car and we drove the roads we'd been driving together for six years on our way to the ceremony.
Graduation itself was shockingly typical. I sat in my seat and watched as the people I’d come to know throughout my childhood walked across the stage into the next chapter of their lives. I couldn’t have blinked enough to miss it: it went on forever. Dinner after with extended family was typical. We loudly discussed the exciting events of the day and the little life details that people just can’t share over the phone but no one blinked because no one knew when the next time we’ll all sit around a table together is. That night my family of four returned home to a house stacked to the ceiling with boxes and climbed onto air mattresses to enjoy our last night in our beloved home.
The next night we hopped in an RV and began our five-day cross country moving/camping trip to Chandler, Arizona. I fell asleep two hours into that first night's drive and when I opened my eyes it was morning at an RV park in Alabama. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes I sat up as we prepared to drive to Arkansas.
At some point, I closed my eyes and sleep stole me again... until I was jolted awake by the sound of shrieking car tires, the smell of burning rubber, and my head slamming into the wall as a car smashed into our passenger side. We were lucky to be okay but the RV itself didn't share our luck. I wished I could blink and everything be normal but instead, I stayed wide eyed as my family waited for help in the parking lot of a Mississippi gas station for seven hours. The next four days there were no RV parks, there was no camp fire dinner, there was no blinking and missing it: the country unfolded in slow motion in front of my eyes.
So now here I am, writing this, from my new home in Chandler, AZ. I've been graduated for a little over a week but I'm worlds away from the people I sat through that ceremony with. I'm worlds away from that gas station in Mississippi. I'm not quite sure when I blinked but I'm also not quite sure if I truly missed it. I feel like even if I'd pried my eyes open it all still would've changed just as fast as the landscapes out the window.
The past two weeks have brought the intense changes that I've lived for the last year expecting but there's a difference between something being a thought of the future and a happening circumstance. This is my new reality: I'm in a new place without any of the familiarity that I crave. I find my comfort in this moment in the warmth of my new bed, the glow of my laptop screen, and letting these words escape through my finger tips into the hole that is the internet.
Right now, I know nothing and no one but in the blink of an eye, I’m sure Chandler will begin to feel like home. One day I’ll go to sleep in this new place and the next I'll wake up and be undoubtedly home because that's just how life happens: in the blink of an eye.
