before I leave

There's a man in my home ward, and he says the best prayers. His face looks like he's lived a thousand years. The creases and lines and weathered skin prove his wisdom. When he speaks, the deepest, most scraggly sound comes out. He always sounds like he is about to cry, but maybe that's because it's always just overflowing with the spirit, and when he prays, oh he prays.  I can hear a little piece of heaven in the way that he puts his words together. I would like to hear him speak forever.

I'm about to leave home for the second time to go back to school. Leaving home this time will be different. Coming back home next time will be different. I have changed so much even in these seemingly monotonous four months. I want such different things now. And I will change in the next four months, and the next. Coming home is always different after being gone, but I always come back. I guess I end where I begin. 

People always told me that coming home after leaving was weird and it didn't feel like home to them anymore. That wasn't the case for me. I came back home and I fit right back in. I guess it's because I was never really gone. A part of my heart will always be there in my little brown room with stripes on the wall. A part of my heart will always be with those memories, those tears, that laughter. Great milestones of my life happened there, so my heart never could leave. A part of my heart is still in that storybook sky and those green green trees that suffocate the place where the sky is supposed to meet the ground. In those orange tennessee sunsets and those stuffy and wet southern nights.

 But then my heart is also in those dry brown mountains. In the football games where everyone is screaming in one voice and then collapsing in one gigantic, victorious cry. In those long nights on crowded beds with the people I love.

I will never be exactly this person in this place again. 

My cousin in Utah always asks me when I'm coming home, and the people around me here in Tennessee always beg me to stay. How lucky I am to have left my heart in so many places.