The Return

"We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?"-Ray Bradbury

I read the words again, wide eyed and slightly open mouthed. Something real. I had read Fahrenheit 451 at least a dozen times, but that sentence had never resonated with me as it did in that moment. It was the sentence that I had searched for, the sentence I had wanted to form with my own inadequate phrasing but had somehow been unable to. It was The Sentence. The sentence on which I would build my next year.
I closed the book and set my reading glasses on the night table, settling into the quiet. Once in a great while, there are those brief whispers of silence that hold tangible significance. Mostly, it seems to me, because true answers are discovered in stillness. The months leading up to this stillness had changed the path of my life in both drastically painful and stunningly beautiful ways. It was during this period that I found no solace in the only solace I had ever found: writing. I could not write for months, which left me to search for an ink-stained compass to guide me from the Land of Writer's Block.
In those months, I moved from my walk-in closet of an apartment to a spacious two bedroom. I painted my walls the color of earth, with bright blues and greens splashed onto an otherwise grave particle board. I fell in love with my kitchen, a cheery yellow, and at most moments wished I could whistle so as to express my joy in a positive and clique' manor.
With this joy, as it happens more often than not, came a sudden and tragic pain. My relationship had ended with a tackle- at- the- five- yard- line kind of hurt, the kind that leaves you with scars and a mild concussion. The color scheme of my apartment instantly seemed less impressive than it had, and all whistling ambition faded from the corners of my smile.
It was not until weeks later, while anxiously waiting to pass through American Airlines customs that I briefly entertained the idea of teaching myself the seemingly useless skill again. I was going to live in Wales. I had closed up my partially painted two bedroom, packed two suitcases, and had gotten on a plane. I had been given an opportunity to study and live in the UK for three months, and with little hesitation, I jumped at the chance.
My world had expanded, shattered, and was now a mosaic of expanding parts. Now, two weeks settled, I was reading in my Welsh bed, living on my Welsh street, and having, what I suppose are by proxy alone, my Welsh revelations. Something real.
I had always considered myself a person who was bothered by injustice in the world around me, but lately that injustice had mostly been what was conveniently unjust toward me. In fact, the realities I had chosen to surround myself with were mostly those of petty doubt. I pulled my knees to my chest, taking in for the first time that I was actually in a foreign country, with infinite possibilities before me. This was the year. Not the year to learn to paint, or the year to jog more. This was the year. I would see the calendar turn over while standing on a cold cobbled street somewhere in Europe, half the globe from my globe-impersonating apartment. This was the year to care about something real. This was the year to be truly bothered by something to point of action. I had inadvertently made my largest and most far-fetched dream a reality in a matter of weeks. This year, I could do anything. I could change anything. I could fearlessly and passionately fight for what I believe in most, and even if I lost the fight, I could bleed for something real.
I dug through my backpack, finally finding my weathered spiral journal. Pen met paper, pointing me north after a long and wandering hiatus. Everything would be different from that point on, and I would write all of it down with a faint, fading whistle.