Endings, Beginnings

My apartment stood empty and quiet, the rooms reduced to vast expanses of off-white carpet and blank beige walls.  My car was packed to overflowing. The keys were on the counter.  When I locked the door and pulled it shut behind me, I’d be leaving this apartment in Gainesville, Georgia for the last time.

I’d nestled in this little haven for a year and a half.  Friends and had visited me here.  I’d put out a kitchen fire, made a tent fort from my furniture and spare sheets, set out fragrant roses in vases and burned candles in the evening.  After yearning for my own place since age fourteen, this apartment had been a dream come true, and I decorated and nested to my heart’s content here.  It was mine.  It was home.

And Gainesville, this big town an hour north of Atlanta, Georgia?  It was here I first lived independently as a princess, away from my parents and the shelter of a small college environment.  I learned how to drive on these streets.  I learned independence and self-discipline.  I learned the value of volunteer work and the futility of empty ambition.  I felt like a woman around age eighteen, but there’s a difference in being a woman and being an independent woman.  I found my feet as an adult in Gainesville, and from here I can find the confidence to be dauntless and venture into the great Beyond.

Comfort is a certain indicator of change coming.  Only a few weeks ago, at this hour in the morning, I was in the kitchen making myself tea and toast as the sun rose and thinking, “I like this life.”  No plans to change a thing.  Looking back now, I should have known change was in the wind.  And deliciously so.

The past few weeks, the stars have aligned for me to move to Atlanta, the city to the south long singing siren songs to me.  That’s not all – starting in about two weeks, I’ll be using Atlanta as my home base to travel to big cities and small ones all over America.

As I shut the door of my apartment behind me for the last time, I found myself smiling.  I’ve made so many memories here… but bigger adventures await.  It’s time to put on toe shoes and dance on the edge of life’s precipice.  Now more than ever, it’s time to be the dauntless princess.

I’m writing this blog to share this life with you: a crazy wonderful chronicle of success, failure, love, looking for the beautiful in the commonplace.

Thank you for reading.  Let’s live 2015 to its fullest.

~The Dauntless Princess~