002. leap

she has always been the kind of person who leaps.

not because something was wrong. because something else was right. or almost right. or not right yet but close enough that her body started leaning before her brain caught up.

she left the south for chicago — a city she’d been to exactly once, where she knew no one — because something in her said go. she left chicago for new york on a gut feeling and a sublet she found through a friend of a friend. and most recently she left new york — the apartment, the life, the version of herself that fit so neatly inside it — not because it broke but because something in her outgrew it.

i keep saying she like it’s someone else.

it’s me.

i wasn’t running from new york. i loved new york. i loved who i was there. but there was this quiet hum underneath everything, the kind you can only hear when you stop moving long enough to notice, and it kept saying the same thing — there’s more.

not more like what i had wasn’t enough. more like the woman i’m becoming needs more room than the one i was.

so i went toward it. without a plan. without a destination. with a suitcase and a gut feeling and the kind of terrified trust that only makes sense in hindsight except i’m not in hindsight yet. i’m still in it.

i don’t know how to explain the difference between running from and running toward to someone who hasn’t felt it in their body. but if you have — if you’ve ever left something good because something truer was pulling you forward — then you already know.

it’s not reckless. it’s the most honest thing i’ve ever done. i can’t see the whole path. i don’t need to. i know it in my bones the way i’ve known every leap before this one — not because i could see where i was landing but because my body was already moving.