Two weeks.

Two weeks from today, I will wake up and eat breakfast with my family.

In America.

How can that be? Didn’t I JUST get here? These five months have crawled and flown at the same time. But nevermind that. They are over now.

I’m walking around and treating every quiet moment like a scene in a movie that I’m trying to watch and memorize simultaneously. The leaves have mostly fallen and the ones left in the trees here are dark with determination to hang on. The sun sets around 4:30pm and by 6:30pm, it might as well be midnight. I stood on Princes Street last night just after dinner in the deeply dark and cold night and looked up at a cloudless sky. The moon was turned up three notches too bright and I just took it all in. I panned around for a 360° view of my daily landmarks that will be memories too soon.

I don’t know how to do this. How to leave. How to end.

I’m a starter. I like starting things. I don’t like endings… especially when endings come with unknowns and confusion and sadness. Everything changes when I’m home. This chapter of my Edinburgh story ends and I don’t know when the next one gets written. This thing that has been building for the last 11 years, living in Scotland, suddenly is my history instead of my future. I have to leave a community that I love, friendships that I want to maintain, and students that are growing in their faith day by day.

I’m sad to leave.

But turn that Annie-is-sad-to-leave coin over and you see a girl who is READY. FOR. HOME. I miss my family like whoa. I miss Nashville and my friends so much. I’m ready for the upcoming weddings and babies and holidays and all the things that December forward holds. And just to be honest, there are also some serious and heartbreaking things going on in some of my friends’ lives and I just want to be there. I want to cook and hug and sit and just be in the same room as the hurting ones.

I told my friend Hannah over chai this morning that I never want to leave Edinburgh… and I want to leave right now.

So as you can imagine, my insides are completely confused. 🙂

I think this is living. Hurting. Leaving. Returning. Rejoicing. Mix it all in a bowl carved out of grace and somehow, you survive.

Days like today I am deeply grateful for eternity, where time and distance and separation will be things we barely remember from before forever. I long for the day when my friends will all be within reach and my heart will be reunited- unlike now, where one jaggedly ripped half lives on each side of the Atlantic.

Let's be friends!

Stay up to date with our weekly newsletter. It’s all things fun with Annie.
No spam we promise