Dare You to Move

Reference the song "Dare You to Move", by Switchfoot.

Although the last time I saw Megan last proved our shared Disney World trip, nearly fifteen years ago, I managed to reconnect with her somehow over Facebook.

Normally my family cut off all ties with my father's original family; my father does not take my Uncle Don, his blood brother, lightly, and my cousins even less so. Of his two half-sisters, we see little to nothing of; sexual, alcohol, and drug abuse long drove the two out of sight, if not completely out of mind. Akin to the twins Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, they prove together, but opposites; one highly religious to the extreme, the other sickeningly off of her rocker.

Yet,somehow, I sensed that my cousins - Shawn and Megan, respectively - somehow escaped the madness from the household that my father ran away from at age sixteen to live with his best friend, Morgan, who even now submits willingly to the chains his wife figuratively leashes him with. Not seeing Megan nor Shawn since a young age - three, I believe - of course I would only, naturally, reconnect with Megan over Facebook fifteen years later.

Almost astoundingly, I felt shocked to see Megan - a smiling, innocent child in the faded picture next to I, much younger - a grown woman, and on top of that, with a steady boyfriend and very pregnant. At first, I deemed it inconceivable; at first, I could not wrap my mind around the image of my "little" cousin in the picture, only now "knocked up" for better terms; that she still stood unmarried bothered me not in the slightest, but that one fact stunned me. Pregnant? Where did the years go?

After two months of quietly reconvening and getting to know my cousin after years of separation - she lived in Seattle, I in Fort Myers, an entire swath of nation away - last night, she gave birth quietly to a little boy, Brayden Edward Barrett, weighing nine pounds and twenty-two inches long. I knew his identity beforehand, of coruse; but hearing it only proved far more mind-numbing and surreal - my "little" cousin, a baby boy and boyfriend in tow? Inconceivable, and yet, all the more real.

Maybe one of these days I will venture to Seattle; a particular wanderlust grips my body in its sway, and I feel all the more restless, to go and see the world. To me, the rainy country sounds so much more serene, its untouched copes of quiet woods proffering an alternative to the heat of the Florida summer, and somehow, I long for it.

Perhaps; but, perhaps not - for something in my bones does not sit well; with the earnest workings of my mind, so I experience the urge to move, to see that which I missed all this time and never even knew existed. Where did the years go?

In any case, my time approaches; soon the jesses of high school will melt away, and I, akin to a hooded Peregrine, kept quietly in the dark, will unfurl my wings and take to the infitinte blue. Only one question nags at my mind and spirit, plaguing my anxious, restless self: where do I go from here?