“Life is really about moving on.” (Oprah)

The unexpected life moves on.

And eventually becomes…your life.

This summer marked four years living mine: four years that I have lived in Utah, four years since I began living in a completely different world than the one I inhabited before, and I confess, I’ve spent four years looking out my window at the beautiful mountains of Utah County, admiring their rocky and jagged beauty, remembering the comfort and strength I took from them as a college student and taking those same feelings about them into the life I live now. A part of me has even considered them my personal barrier of safety from the horror I left in Colorado.

And then, a few months ago,  I realized it has been FOUR YEARS. Unconsciously or not, I’ve spent the past four years on this side of those mountains. Safely and far away from “terrible” Colorado. I didn’t tell anyone that’s how I felt or that that’s what I was doing, but it was. I haven’t set foot in the Centennial State I left it in the rear view mirror of my used Subaru July 13, 2009.

I’ve been invited to visit. There are people there that I love and miss. But there has been NO WAY I would ever return to the hard things I endured before I moved to Utah. I’ve stayed WELL away.

And then one day my husband looked at me and said, “Lets go to Colorado. It’s time you go back.”

I was stunned.

There is NO WAY I would ever go back.

Or is there?