To the one about to leave:
It’s not the first time you’ve left home, but it might be the last. As you head off for your senior year of college, this will be your last year as a child. Technically, legally even, you are an adult, and I understand that with all of its ramifications. But you will always be my child, so I feel like now is the time I should tell you this. Never again will you enjoy the full experience of living without adult responsibilities. That freedom is easily overlooked, even taken for granted. I want to be sure you take the time to immerse yourself in it and find what it is that you need to do.
I’ve never told you this before, but now you have that gleam in your eye. I know that gleam. I’ve had it. It means you need to do something different, something other than what is expected of you. I tried. I cut my hair short, so short that when I went outside with wet hair on a cold New Jersey day, my hair froze in tiny spikes. It made me feel dangerous, like my black low cut boots and leather jacket. But it eventually melted, leaving me with damp, flat hair and a deflated sense of missed possibility.
You have the chance. Right now, before anyone tries to stop you. Do it. Do the thing that scares you. Not just freezing your hair. Or for that matter, dying it a non-hair color. I think that trend may be passing. Especially the gray. Definitely don’t go gray before you have to. I speak from experience there. Tattoos, while brave and daring, can be complicated too, because you will have them for the rest of your life. And though it is impossible to understand now, there are very few things that will remain truly meaningful to you. People and philosophies will come in and out of your life, leaving their own indelible mark on your soul, but believe me when I say that you will prefer to forget some of them. The outline of a heart is what suits you best now, a shape that will be filled in with all of the love you will find in your life.
Right now, before the time passes, you need to do whatever it is that rises up to meet you, the thing that makes you feel like you can fly, untethered to anyone and anything. Because you can’t go back and do it later.
I don’t know what that is for you, and no one really knows but you. You may not even know it yet. But when it offers itself to you, seize that moment. Enjoy the uncertainty, the heart-racing adrenaline rush of not knowing where it will take you. I didn’t and I’ll always regret it. It’s something that will always be not there, like a negative tattoo, a blank space that was never filled in.
The chance was there and I didn’t take it—a swinging trapeze and I was too scared to hold on. I dropped it, landing in my safety net of usual circumstances, a little bruised and dazed but safe on the ground. I never took the chance to really fly.
I don’t regret my choices to the extent that they brought me where I am today. I would not be who I am, where I am, without them. But sometimes, I wonder how it would have felt, what else I could have done. I think about it most in the earliest hours of the morning when no one else is awake. My heart feels stretched like a worn rubber band, past the taut breaking point, big and loose to include you and so many others. You have filled my life with so much love, in more ways than I could ever have imagined. And as you leave, I’m left here, with this stretched out shape inside of me, a heart full of open space. Maybe I should get that tattoo.
