I’m sitting in one of my last Azusa sunsets for a while, in this summer’ed warm air. The night is falling on my freshman year and I’m not sure what to feel. I’m sitting in the rose garden, trying to write, and I can’t concentrate. My hands are empty of thought and I have nothing more to seemingly give. This place has given me everything. This place has given me a name. This place has given me myself back. I’ve learned more about freedom and fears and forgiveness and failure in the last eight months than I even care to think about. I’ve fought my way through a place where I was my only enemy and I have collapsed into the arms of those who love me, who know me, who have, in some way, become part of me again and again and again.

The sky is split into blue and yellow, and my heart kind of feels the same way. I am joyous of what has been completed here, in this place. I am rejoicing that this day is done and of everything I have been given during my time here. Yet, I am blue, and am becoming darker by the minute. My hands feel heavy and my sighs linger, casting shadows on this torn and brilliant night.

How much farther do I have? Can I go back to begin it all again?

This has been a year of defeat as much as it has been of succeeding. And I am tired. I don’t know how to reconcile this feeling of being so alive with this kind of exhaustion. It’s the painful kind of tired, the kind sleeping doesn’t touch; It’s the feeling of the mud right before it is stirred, like the moments right before the alarm of a restless night. It’s like the salmon’s breath before the salt leaves its gills forever. Maybe exhaustion isn’t the right word; perhaps it’s weary hesitation.

It’s the uncomfortable lack in the tightrope before it’s pulled taut: how do I leave the place that taught me how to live? I can carry a picture in this hardened heart locket that beats into the night, but my hands are slipping and the truth is that I’m not sure I remember how to breath without this kind of air. I look ahead and see nothing, I see fear and darkness and an unfinished puzzle with too many pieces left. I look forward and I see an absence, and I cannot see myself there until I am, until I have arrived.

And I think, for me, the hardest part of all, is I feel like I’ve been running in the same damn place. That I haven’t moved an inch, and have demanded an ell; that maybe all these lessons learned might just have been the vacancy that everyone else had filled. We witnessed so much change in ourselves that I ask, “maybe we haven’t changed at all.” I don’t know why I feel this way, I guess it is just that kind of night. The sky is like a mirror to me, and tonight, holding it up against my heart shows the dense mystery of my soul tonight.

The truth is, I don’t know how to say goodbye. I don’t know how and I don’t want to know how. The colors of this place turn my eyes bright and full of strange crystal streams. If I could be silent and hear anything, it would be the sound of the dawn stretching out her fingers upon a delicate new day, birthed out of the Love’s echoes. And I can’t fathom this kind of life, this kind of living that turns my skin to fire. This kind of passion that make me wonder why I cannot jump into the stars.

And I could write with all my mind, and all my heart, and all my soul, and it wouldn’t be as eloquent as what my silence has to say.