I Can See For Miles and Miles...

Nothing But Sky

The night before I left from Logan airport, I could barely sleep a blink in my own bed. I tossed, I turned, I stared at the white of the ceiling as the dark frowned around me and wondered. What would it all be like? What will change before I'm back again? What have I gotten myself into? The next morning, I quietly assembled my bags at the door and drove in practical silence to the airport with my parents. I was so excited, yet so nervous. I had never flown before alone. This really was a whole new independent life I was starting. After getting my ticket and dropping off my baggage, I got in line for the security checkpoint. My parents followed me, stayed there standing near me, as I snaked my way through the line. When I reached the front, they hugged me quickly and I turned and watch them go. This was the beginning.

I was on my own, leaving the one place I knew to try something incredibly exciting but incredibly scary as well. Traveling abroad is something I have done before in high school, so it wasn't the fear of homesickness that worried me, or some fright that I might not be ready to live away from home. I knew I'd be okay. But it came to me suddenly in the airport that I had thought so much about all the things to do before I left (spend time with my family, watching movies warm under blankets while the New England snow piled high outside the window; order take out with my friends and laugh and stay out late, driving again and again through the same old tired town we'd known since we were kids; live New York as much as I could one last time before leaving it for so many months, take cabs with my friends, laugh in the rain, and get wet, watch the skyline darken and spring to yellow light in the morning) that I had left myself no time to think about what it would be like when I finally arrived, when it all began, and I was no longer waiting, but living it. All these thoughts bombarded me as I sat anxiously at the departure gate, half-reading American Pyscho, which my sister had recommended as a smart and fierce choice of book for a young girl sitting alone. Before I knew it, they were calling the flight and we were boarding. I looked around, at the people milling around in quiet businesslike fashion, out the windows a the landscape of the country, green and rustling in the wind, at the sky, white and flat, I was just about to penetrate, whose arc I would soon follow to another side of the world. I boarded the plane and breathed. As the engines started up, I took one last look out the window. The country began moving, then whirring in blurry lines beneath my gaze, and then we were off, and everything was falling away below me into the past, and there was nothing but sky in front. As the plane reached the top of the sky, the blue and green of the earth fell away and there was only white around. Clouds, pillows, endless wasps of blue. I smiled. It was beautiful. Closing the window, I leaned back and closed my eyes. This was going to be quite an adventure.