Five Minute Friday - Fly

On Fridays a bunch of brave writers gather here to all spend 5 collective minutes writing on a single prompt. It’s a great way to catch your breath at the end of a long week. This blessed, beautiful place where we open our hearts and let words and tears and the inner workings of our lives bleed and flow and dance across the virtual pages. Yes, this community opens wide and invites you in to share. Come and visit and read. You will be blessed.

This Week: Fly

Go

It’s been four years. That’s a long time to be away. There is so much that I miss. But so much that I don’t. Did I read once, “you can never go home again?” We tried. It didn’t take. It didn’t take at all. Almost wrenched us out of orbital alignment and sometimes, there’s still the bitter copper taste of old blood and bad memory when we talk about it. But it’s a good place to be from.

It’s home. Where the heart is. And there is so much of my heart that is still there. So much that it hurts.

While I have planted my feet securely in the Pacific Northwest, my lungs breathe with the rhythm of the waves against the sand on Lanikai and my skin longs to feel the sweep of the trade winds coming off the Ko’olaus.

I have left roots in the islands that will never sever, no matter how long I am away. And though I sometimes struggle with the distance and what it means, there is part of me that will always find my way home there.

It is an unfolding that is as easy as tumbled sheets and well-worn blankets, thin with age. The tension I consistently carry in my day-to-day somehow melts as I wrap myself in family, familiar scents, sounds, and the food that I cannot let go of – keeping numbers of long-forgotten and closer restaurants in my phone just because I can. My husband says even my language loosens; my cadence slows; and though I’ll swear to you I don’t have an accent of any kind, he grins to hear me order items and hold conversations with people who suddenly sound more like me than I thought they did.

There is no trans-Pacific highway, even in my dreams, but I’ll be on a concourse soon enough: t minus just a few days now. Shivering in the early morning here because in less than six hours, I’ll step out there and smell that singular mix of salt spray, plumeria, and tarmac that lets me know I’m home. The only way to get there is to fly – I’ve got to get on that plane and go. I’m not excited yet – I never am until the last minute.

And then the last minutes will vanish like candle smoke and I’ll forget all the worries and stresses that have been plaguing me and it will just be joy at the idea of being home. Seeing them and being in their arms and in the midst of their love. For that, I will fly.

Stop

A little sound of home that always takes me back:

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