it's cold winds buffeting you so you can hardly see
your new jacket billows around you like a parachute,
it's your very first mountain and you're about to be blown off the top.
Your sister goes over the "Do Not Cross" line
and she doesn't get hurt, so you realize the line doesn't matter
it's black waves and gray skies colliding with spurts and spews
of wet belief, it's ordering the wrong thing and laughing for days
about it, it's coffee after every meal and going into a bar
for the first time, it's losing your passport and it's rain
and mud and hotel rooms and your family together
it's having friends in Argentina, it's twelve hours
of laughter and tears and cards in a hotel because your driver didn't
pick you up. It's knowing your mother for who she really is.
It's running through graveyards to look at these
crisp hills and polluted rivers and cute boys too old for you
and you don't talk to them. It's mead and dancers
and hot colorful rooms and castles and daggers
and eating things with your hands. It's strange cities
that you love and your parents hate. It's warm breakfast
in a pastel of a place, it's sloped streets next to a beach,
even though it feels like winter to you it's warm for everyone else.
It's chicken and stuffing sandwiches. It's train rides.
It's waiting at a train station. It's fear and anxiety and fog but it's
cold and refreshing and breathtaking and cliffs
and rocks carved out by the thumbs and nails of a creator, and you launch
into this green, stony world with nothing but your own freedom
and the ancient love of your family and your God,
it's the mist on your face before you even thought about growing up
the last breath of your childhood but you felt as if it would last forever
no end was in sight, it is just there and it is happy and it is free
and somehow you were growing up in the midst of it.