Cocooned in my orange blanket-cape and clutching my quasi-IV of Emergen-C, all I want in this moment is my mom and dad. But there are highways and heartbeats between us—and maybe that’s the most frightening realization of all.
I have reached a milestone in my life; no longer is “home” a concrete place in which I can collapse into bed each night. Instead, it has shed its four-walled chrysalis and emerged a vagabond spirit, tucking itself away into precious moments and people in unexpected corners of this Earth.
For as long as I can remember, my heart’s permanent residence has been East Marion, the sleepy seaside village on the East End of Long Island. But now, as a sophomore at Princeton, I know that a piece of my heart will belong to Old Nassau long after I turn my tassel and march out of the FitzRandolph Gate. And whenever the future decides to exercise its capriciousness, spinning the globe and sending loved ones journeying, additional fragments of my heart will wind up stowed away in passports and postcards, suitcases and snow globes.
Last January, a sliver of my heart embedded itself in Rome’s cobblestone streets, and a second one will always remain cloaked in clouds at the tip of Florence's Duomo, where I stood atop the ancient world at daybreak. A third piece of my heart was cast away into the unceasing cascade of Argentina's Garganta del Diablo last July, when I came face to face with Mother Nature’s purest form of magic at Iguazu Falls.
Every day of my life, I try to leave a bit of my heart in a fleeting moment in time. Some moments, I may be lucky enough to relive over and over, and others offer no return ticket.
They are both worth chasing.
Last August, my sister and I peddled breathlessly down Rocky Point Road, racing the sunset. When we finally reached the beach, we abandoned our bicycles and stampeded down the creaky wooden staircase toward the familiar sea of beach glass and jingle shells.
This time, however, something new awaited us on the horizon, freezing us in our tracks.
There, silhouetted against the sherbet sun, was a lone fisherman perched atop a boulder, casting his line into the horizon against the Long Island Sound’s endless ebb and flow. Entranced, my sister and I tiptoed down the shoreline, plopped down on a white birch log, and watched.
“Angelina,” I whispered minutes later, as darkness enveloped the last snatch of cotton candy sky, “I think this is what life is about.” She nodded in silent agreement, and we both titled our heads back and waited for a map of constellations to dot the inky black void. Words are not needed in moments like this.
Granted, moments may lack the tangibility of a home in which I can curl up fireside and heat chicken noodle “sicky soup” on the burner.
But they, too, have raised me.
