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It’s a bit like scraping the scab off an old wound—one that was just that close to being healed and forgotten, yet there’s the pain again and now it’s time to start the process over from the beginning. The hot summer wind blows grit into the sore and it stings with memories of the two summers past. One, a pang of heartache and the fear of leaving what is known behind; the other, a sharp stab of that terrifying truth that my venture into the unknown has changed my view of the known forever. I go back to a Goldendale July and I am no longer Mrs. Liening of Olympia. I’m the girl who watched Mt. Hood fade into the horizon on a United Airlines flight out of Portland, asking herself why she had willingly walked the plank into a sea of total strangers—the girl who later said goodbye to the truest friends she ever knew and found herself sitting alone on a familiar sundrenched porch, viewing the world through the blurred lens of lonely tears.

Sometimes I feel as though I’m in mourning, but I can’t express what it is that I lost. I only know that I’ll be moving through life at a steady clip, heart and hands too busy to hurt, when suddenly like a fist to the gut it will all hit me and I’ll find that I’m crushed under the weight of the last two years and I just can’t stop crying.