From the Past

Every time that I moved somewhere new, I traveled with the hope of finding a place that would heal me.  Without admitting it to myself, I was hoping that moving would be the solution to the empty hole left in my heart.   Maybe my love for this amazing place would overtake my longing for the love of my family and leave me feeling whole.  I traveled through endless towns looking for this perfect place, found some pretty breath taking locations, but never mended the broken pieces of my heart. 

Moving was the greatest distraction to my unsolvable dilemmas.  I would find myself in a foreign land by myself trying to navigate my new home, finding a place to live, making connections, developing friendships, joining clubs, delving into new and exciting hobbies, and trying to learn a new language.  There was not a lot of time to remember the life I had left behind.  I became an expert at reestablishing myself.  There was no culture I could not mold myself to fit into, but while I was trying to mold into each of these new cultures, I was ignoring the one person that needed me the most.  Erin as the child who had lost her family.  I was forgetting the real reason I had fled to these far off locations burying myself under all the new identities I was taking on.

As I became more proficient at adjusting to each new location, it became harder to forget the past I was running from.  I would become established too quickly leaving me the time to start thinking again.  Thinking about the problems I had left behind, my mom who I had abandoned in that empty house with alcohol as her only comfort, my brother who was now going through a painful divorce and my dad who I had not heard from in over three months.  These truths began to catch up to me faster than I could run and the running was beginning to drain away my life.  I never found that amazing place that would magically heal my broken heart.  Healing had nothing to do with my physical location.

In a few months, I had become settled in Santiago, living with a girl from Colombia, teaching English at a community college, spending every weekend in the mountains with a local mountaineering club and learning Spanish simply by spending all of my time immersed in the language.  I told myself that this could be the place, I could stay here forever and permanently leave my past behind.  But three months into my life in Santiago, the signs of my unsettled soul began to emerge.