The dream goes like this: the sky is still and warm and vein blue. The stars are clearly visible, the moon full. I feel nervous, unsteady. My balance is off. I look down and see the thin and familiar outline of my road, all gravel and potholes. Thick trees line both sides, swaying with the light breeze that picks up my hair. I am high up, higher than I’ve ever been before. I realize that I am standing on a telephone pole.

My chest tightens, my hands start shaking even though I’m trying desperately to stand still. My knees buckle and I feel the deep heat of fear rise into my throat. I don’t know how I got here. I think of shimmying down, hoping that when I bend to wrap my limbs around the pole, I won’t fall off, smacking my head against rock, a guaranteed instant death. I want to yell, but all there is to hear me is space and fog. I feel like crying, but there is a strange lifting sensation beneath my sternum that sends electricity down my sides. I look down again. Seeing the ground so far off send me whirling with a foreign thrill that fills my chest. With a tentative foot, I inch off the small space I stand on, feeling the ground go out beneath me, the current of cold wind run wild across my body, my stomach gulping in excitement, and I wake up.

I’m afraid of flying. To be fair, I’m afraid of most things, especially things that could potentially put me under a fresh coat of dirt and funeral flowers. The moments when we hit rough patches of air and send the plane into turbulence, my hands grip my armrests and my heart beats like a rabbit. This is it, I think. This is how I go. Of course, it never is, and I always step off the plane shaking and giddy with the prospect of continuing life. The problem with this irrational fear is that planes take people places that cars can’t afford to go. Take three hours of a plane ride and visit Atlanta or drive for fourteen hours, your choice. And for a girl with no car (me) my options are limited.

The idea of travel has been and always will be romanticized for me. Imagining drinking coffee at a side café in Italy, rollerblading down the street in Venice, dancing at an underground bar hall in New York. I have lived in West Virginia for most of my short life and continue to tell myself and other people that I am dying to get out. The issue is, I’m not sure if I can. I’m writing this from Austin, Texas. Upon arrival, I went to an upscale restaurant on the East Side, feeling light and beautiful with my rolled up jeans and red lipstick. When I got there, I saw at least ten other girls much thinner and more beautiful than me. They walked with straight backs and an understanding that they belonged there, that the hundreds of dollars they were spending came with a casual shrug. I panicked. If I am average in this budding city, what will I be in larger ones?

I am comfortable in the mountains of my hometown. I enjoy the name I’ve made for myself, the small food vendors, the shitty nightclubs. I can walk down the street feeling like the ground I’m walking is my own, and in that claim there I find power that I do not have here, in Austin. I worry, though, that my life will become a walking nightmare. I worry that I will not do what my younger self did and jump for the thrill of it, knowing that there is little to do but wait, unmoving from that place she knew as safe. Maybe this is the reason over seventy-five percent of adults live within fifteen miles of their childhood homes. It feels good to live in a space of certainty.