Beauty in the Dirt

“Goodbye” is a word I’ve grown accustomed to, growing up in a traveling family of nomads until I was eighteen years old, and moving straight to China when I graduated from college. Until I was eighteen, relationships lasted about a week, apart from the few friends I made at home, whose lives went on without me when I would leave for months at a time. They tried their best to understand. Goodbye sometimes became a word with dull and hollow emotions attached to it. It was easier sometimes not to try, not to hold on, not to feel. A few special, beautiful people pushed past that barrier, and though they made leaving hard again, they made coming back a momentous occasion. I’m grateful for those people. One of them is now my husband. When I was twenty-one, my husband and I said “goodbye” to everything we knew, and moved across the world to a scary new place, where I knew nothing, I was the minority, and I understood nothing. It was hard. I was blessed to fall into a