April 15, 2017

Three Easters ago, I found myself on the coast of Croatia, running along the Adriatic in the pouring rain. Church bell after church bell clanged throughout the city, gathering Catholics to hear the story of Christ’s resurrection in a language I had no shot at understanding. I was running from something. I was running from everything. I was running without knowing why, just that I had to, and I kept going until the path dropped into the sea. Yesterday, someone asked me what the best year of my life has been, and I didn’t have an answer. My hope is that it’s yet to come, but if I had to choose from the ones I’ve already lived, it would be this: my twenty-seventh. Though it began with plummeting from one bad living situation to another, I ended up in the place I’ve now called home for three years. Through a series of choices and circumstances I still can’t entirely trace, I started working with the people who, for better or worse, have become my second family. And after dreaming of the Italian coastline for as long as I could remember, I got there, then journeyed onto Croatia and discovered a strange world of ruinous beauty. Only in looking back do I realize this was the year I began to let go of the vice grip I’d so long kept on my existence, the year I began to accept that I would never feel safe in this world and that everything I’d been doing in a frantic effort to protect myself was in fact doing the opposite. I’m still not where I’m supposed to be. There’s still a lot that I lack. But I spend more time now running towards, rather than from, and to me, that feels something like redemption.