August 18, 2017
My phone is vibrating in my pocket and I have a very real knowledge that it’s my mom calling to ask me where I am. It’s almost 10:00pm and I have to be up at 1:30am to catch my flight. I know I should be in bed because 3 and a half hours of sleep is not a good way to start a new season but i’m not ready to let go of this one.
As i’m finishing my last round of skeeball, my best friends are laughing at a bad joke Steve made and taking small sips of the free beer he just won all of them. Tears begin to well in my eyes for the 29th time tonight as I walk over to Bailey and let her know that mom is getting concerned and we should probably head home.
The car door shuts and Bailey puts on our favorite playlist for the last time. We drive home in silence as I desperately try to hold back the river in my eyes. The ride felt like a second as I anticipated the potential for sleep. It had been such an emotional day. I got in bed quickly with Bailey in the bed next to me. The room was quiet and still but my head and my heart were all over the place. My mind is going a million miles an hour and I can’t keep my emotions together so I make the decision to get up.
I walk down the hall to mom’s room and when I see her face, I let out all of the anguish and grief that I had been holding in my heart all day. The tears won’t stop coming and I’m hyperventilating with despair. Mom used to drive me around in the car when I was little to calm me down and why wouldn’t it work as a 22 year old? We get in the car and I weep as she drives me all over the city, hoping that I’ll stop crying or get so tired that I forget my circumstances.
This was it. I wasn’t going to see Bailey for 12 full months. An entire year without my very best friend. I hadn’t spent more than a few weeks at a time without her and now we were going to live completely separate lives from one another. I hadn’t ever lived a life separate from hers.
To make a long story short, I left home at 2:00am for World Race training camp and said goodbye to bailey for the next year of our lives. It was a two hour drive to the airport and I cried the entire way. Ten days later I came home from Georgia and my sister was gone. She had moved out.
I hadn’t realized my dependence on Bailey until I no longer had her. Her life was moving in a new direction, so was mine and for the first time it was in different directions.
I haven’t been homesick much and I don’t think about Green Bay, Wisconsin often. However i’m homesick for car rides, Walmart trips, wing Wednesday’s, morning commutes to the park, McDonald’s sugar free vanilla iced coffees, I miss sharing a room and pushing our twin beds together, I miss going to Barnes and Noble for fun and Luna dates. I miss effortless hours spent together.
I miss my sister.
For 22 years, the Lord intertwined my life with that of another’s. For the first time, Papa revealed to me an identity apart from her.
