Improbable

I exhaled today. I’m currently sitting at SFO, waiting for my flight to LA. Learning from previews experiences of missing flights I got up at six thirty this morning to be able to get here a few hours before my flight. The ride on BART here consisted of me constantly checking my boarding ticket that I printed at home. I checked the date: 11/28/08. Good. I checked the airport: SFO. I checked the time of the flight: 10:05AM. Perfect. Maybe I had confused the AM with the PM flight time. Maybe I went to SFO but the flight was out of OAK. Maybe the flight was tomorrow, and I mistakenly came to the airport today. The ride on BART was emblematic of how I got to where I am today.

This semester has been by far one of the most difficult times of my life. I was homeless. I took a full load at school. I became a pharmacy technician. Getting here consisted of making “To Do Lists” over and over again. Double and triple checking everything that I needed to do. There were days that started at five in the morning, and days that ended at three in the morning and not because I was out with my friends. I’ve never worked this hard for anything in my life.

But now that most of what I needed to do is done. Now that most of the tasks in the list have been checked I’m able to exhale. And I exhaled. I exhaled and I cried a little. I exhaled all the pressure that had been building up inside of me in attempting to get here. I cried because I realized that I got here. That I achieved something. That I’m going back home for the first time in eight years, and because I’m leaving behind not just my friends for a month, but also what seemed elusive until this morning; I’m leaving behind my home: San Francisco. I exhaled today. I exhaled and I cried a little.