There you were standing on the jetway. It was time.
All you have to do is leave everything you've ever known.
Everything. Almost everything? Pretty much everything.
Everything.
"I'm gonna get a phone when we get there?" You asked. And I'll never forget that moment.
You're voice didn't shake but it shook me.
Yeah, you'll get a phone.
"Can I come back?" Was you're next question.
Yeah. Of course. We'll all come back. But we gotta go for now.
And you know what that means. Kind of.
You gotta leave everything. Walk away from everything.
The clothes that you shared, in the room that you shared.
The life that you shared with the friends that you shared everything with.
"We don't speak the language". Yeah, it's gonna be tough. But you're gonna be bi-lingual.
And after that, you didn't say anything.
But I could see the calculations you were doing in your mind.
There was no way to be sure.
It was decided.
And we were in the car and airport and almost suddenly on the Jetway.
Standing on the jetway.
And you get on the plane. And the door closes. And the seat belts are fastened. The phones are turned off. Maybe some are just switched to airplane mode.
And you follow the strange people, and eat the strange food. And drink the strange orange juice, which is absolutely terrible. And you sleep in the strange beds, in the strange room, in the strange house on the strange street, with the strange trees. And there's cats. And there's dogs. And lots of other stuff you've never seen. Much of which is not great.
And So I didn't mention it before but included in the "all you have to do" thing... is that you have to go to school... And all you have to do is do well. And I didn't mention that it will be very difficult. And it will absolutely be very difficult. You will have to try. You absolutely have to try. You have to work hard. Much harder than anyone that you've ever known.
You will be the first in your bio-family to graduate from high school. That's the whole thing.
But, and this is a lot of truth all in one place, it won't be given to you. Nothing is given to you except what you started with. Which happens to be more than enough. The virtue is buried in the work. Dig.