It’s odd that it takes me leaving Cherry Hill to choose happiness first.

I only allow myself time to think when I’m walking along remote beaches, and the only time I listen to the lyrics of songs is on flights that aren’t bogged down by 11:59 deadlines. It’s odd that most Cherry Hill inhabitants don’t know the girl that always carries a little notebook filled with marginalia and sporadic streams of consciousness, but that’s the only girl the rest of the world knows.

Vacations are an odd awakening. I’m the same person in and out, just in a different place. Why does the place matter so much? Maybe in the oceans and streets where nobody knows my name, it feels like I have permission to live freely rather than conform to the constraints of an environment. Maybe leaving Cherry Hill means leaving reality. I can be the person I wish I could be. I wish I could be that person in Cherry Hill.

So maybe I call a place a home because it allows me to live, but sometimes I have to question what life I’m living. Why does it take me leaving home to realize I don’t even know the person who is living in it. I’m so caught up in the requirements to be home, that I don’t even give room to understand the person fulfilling the requirements. I only allow myself to wonder and be curious and ask questions without feeling like I’m wasting my time when I’m away from that place, that beautiful yet claustrophobic place I call home.

And yet as I write this, I return home. Because the song always ends— the best moments never last, they just turn into those forever gone memories. I look out the airplane window at the sun’s coral soul and watch as the darkness overtakes its fiery heart.

So here’s a love letter to the places I’ve been and the places I’ve yet to go. And sometimes it seems like the letter’s spaces are times at home and all the writing is loving in far away places, miles away from my butterfly bedroom, but even the in between has constructed me.

Without the in between there would be no story. Sometimes you need the spaces to appreciate the beauty of the prose.

So maybe this is a see ya later. To the girl who can appreciate the full beauty of sunsets, stare at waves and clouds without guilt, and go on long walks knowing that she has the time to get lost.

But maybe it’s time to realize that that slipping-out-of-grasp-girl and I are both the same.