Boston...

"In the light of the sun, is there anyone? Oh, it has begun...Oh dear, you look so lost, your eyes are red and tears are shed, this world you must've crossed; You said you don't know me, and you don't even care, oh yeah, and you said you don't know me, and you don't wear my chains; She said I think I'll go to Boston, I think I'll start a new life, I think I'll start it over, where no one knows my name..." [-Augustana]

Dublin International Airport

The customs officer is looking at me, my hands are trembling, just slightly. Less nerves. More emotion. His eyes are a soft cornflower blue, and his accent, like a familiar song to me by now- he smiles as he hands me back my passport and says to me "And did you like our fair city now, Jillian from California?" And my voice is a whisper, "Yes, very much so. I should very much like to come back someday." And he nods his head and as I pass through the gate he says "We'll be here to welcome you back when you do. Safe travels now."

It was all only ever suppose to be a dream.

This, Ireland.

Ireland.

But here I sit at the Delta gate in the Dublin Airport, waiting to board a Boston bound flight to carry me back home to the States. Here, I sit saturated in the flesh and bone reality of living this dream these two weeks last.

And I know now that I cannot go back.

I cannot go back to that woman that I was before this moment.

I can no longer be the woman that felt herself content at the thought of settling for a dream.

I can no longer be the woman who as Dumbledore might have said of her, dwelled on dreams, forgetting to live.

Because she woke up, that woman, she woke up on a Saturday morning, on the 2nd of September and she boarded a flight bound for Amsterdam which led her on to another flight that took her to Ireland.

And after years of sleeping, she woke up.

And it changed her, irrevocably, this waking.

It changed her.

I am pondering the sheer enormity of this thought, it changed me, this changed me, when I hear the boarding call for my flight.

For a split second, I can't make my feet move.

My body is crying out, no, no, I can't go back.

It feels as though once I take that seat, it may very well erase the woman that I have awoken to.

I close my eyes. I breathe. In. And out.

How different this moment than that of the one two weeks prior.

How different indeed.

And yet the collision of that moment and this moment is found in the same echoing of baby steps, get on the plane. Breathe. Baby steps, just breathe.

And so I do...

****

Boston Logan International Airport

After an 8 hour flight, I am in for a 5 hour layover and the only coherent thought that I am capable of at this moment is that of, I need coffee.

I am tired. I am emotionally spent. And I NEED coffee.

I am standing in line at Starbucks wishing for something that might remind me that it was real, Ireland. Because the tired has set in. The cold has descended. The heaviness of this life that I live present day has been roused and I feel it gnawing at me, this life where I feel like a constant mistake, and it begins to pull at the fabric of that treasured tapestry that Ireland built into me, as if this layover is some kind of litmus test to the vitality of my seemingly new narrative.

And when the Starbucks kid condescendingly informs me that I cannot have a cappuccino freddo because it's like this, we're not in Europe yo and like welcome back to the States, so what else are you having because I've got a line lady? I feel my hands clench while my heart sinks and I say, just an ice coffee, while a tear slides down my face and think to myself, well, there you go, you failed...

I walk away with my ice coffee, aimless.

My body is a solid weight of nervous kinetic energy. I walk in circles. And when the circles give way, I walk in disconnected patterns. Down the escalator, past the long passenger corridor, up the escalator. Past the Sabarro Pizza. Past the Boston News Store. Past the drinking fountains. Past the West Jet gates. And I turn around and walk back to where I started from. I walk this loop about five times. And somewhere along the way, I finally take notice of some large white wooden rocking chairs and I simply collapse into one.

I close my eyes and the world becomes still. And for a moment, I am caught up inside a memory, well a montage really, a broken stream of moments, all of the moments that led to this moment:

I was 17 years old crying myself to sleep for the umpteenth time, the hallmark of my fractured childhood- and as I lay there in my bed, staring out at the moon, I closed my eyes and transported myself to Ireland.

Shadows of my tumultuous 20's. Always holding on to this wisp of a dream in the blackness...

And then there was that ultimate dark night, Arizona. Keep holding on, that is what I told myself through those first few years.

That night I woke up in the detox unit at Hoag Hospital after severe addiction complications.

The 172 days of treatment that followed.

The days and nights of putting myself and my life back together that came after those 172 days.

And that Wednesday- it was 3:37 in the morning, when my fingers pressed the confirm button for a round trip plane ticket from Los Angeles to Dublin.

To that April afternoon where I sat in a doctor's office hearing the news that my heart was really sick, that I was really sick.

At the crux of it all, I had every reason to not go.

But then again, at the crux of it all, I had every reason to go.

It was a paradoxical tug-o-war inside my head up until the night I was packing my suitcase.

I had wondered if I was merely running away from my life because I am a runner after all.

But life happened in Ireland.

And life beget life, beget life.

And for the first time in my thirty plus years, I lived the most authentic version of myself that I have ever known.

I lived.

And I lived it well.

And so maybe sitting in this rocking chair in Boston, what I know now is that I was not running away from something, I was running towards something.

I was running towards myself.

And with that seemingly significant thought, I walk back to the Delta gate.

And I feel a resolve building inside of my fragile being, that this is not the end of that woman that Ireland built, no this is not the end.

And I close my eyes, and put my headphones in and sing out softly, "I think I'll go Boston, I think I'll start a new life, I think I'll start it over..."

I hear the boarding call for my flight. 6 hours to California. Back to where I started from.

It's not the end.

And I take my seat and watch Boston fade into the clouds and think, no, no, it's not the end, it's just the beginning.

Somehow, someway, I will keep this woman alive, one breath at a time.

I promise.

-Jillian Nichole, it's just the beginning.