Preface

In three days time, I will leave the only home I’ve ever known — a cozy apartment in Northern California — to become a student at Franklin University Switzerland. This is the biggest adventure I have ever embarked upon in my 18 years of life, and while I eagerly await such an incredible opportunity, I am also filled with sadness.

For the past year and a half I have been in love. What started out as a childish affair transformed into something truly remarkable around June of last year. Lucky isn’t neccessarily the right word, but I ceratinly feel grateful. Grateful to have grown so close to another person, and to have known such emotional intimacy.

But now it’s August, and change is severing another summer of love. We try to regard our situation of forced separation maturely, but it still feels like giving something up, like letting something go when we just want to hold on a little tighter for a little longer. What I truly fear is that leaving will seal this realtionship in my girlhood, and that in the future we won’t be able to connect quite like we do now.

Perhaps in a parallel universe we were meant to run away and extend our premature love into forever. In this life though, I know our current relationship of ease could not sustain a future of what ifs. We both need to go to college and find ourselves separately, even if cutting ties temporarily will hurt. Besides, pressed flowers are always dead, even when kept on the most delicate Egyptian papyrus. No, we must grow our own ways and if meant to, on some future date, grow together once again.