April 2023 was a strange and tender month. One foot in what I was leaving, one foot already pointed toward Santa Fe and whatever I'd find there. That particular kind of between — not quite arrived, not quite gone — is something I have learned to sit with, though I will not pretend I always manage it gracefully. Some transitions you navigate with dignity. Some you navigate sitting on the floor in the middle of a half-packed room, questioning everything while surrounded by things you forgot you owned.
I had been packing. Not just boxes — though there were absolutely boxes, and anyone who has moved knows that packing is essentially an archaeological excavation of your own life conducted while you question every decision you've ever made. You find things you forgot. Things you kept for reasons that made sense in a previous version of yourself. Things that are clearly trash but that you inexplicably carry anyway because throwing them away feels like a verdict. I packed more carefully that April than I had anything in years. What I took was intentional. What I left was, too. Painful as it was.
What April made plain is that a move like this is never only about logistics. It is about choosing a direction and then accepting all the tenderness and disruption that the choice requires. Santa Fe was not a vague hope by then. It was a path I had already committed to, toward family, closeness, and a life that matched what I knew I actually needed.
The Path We Choose belongs here because April was a month of committed direction. Packing for Santa Fe meant shaping a future on purpose, one honest decision at a time, instead of waiting for certainty to arrive first.
The other truth about April is that packing is one of the ways a decision becomes irreversible in the body. Before the boxes, a move is still partly theoretical. Once the books are wrapped, the drawers emptied, and the objects sorted into keep, give away, or finally let go, the future becomes physical. I think that is why the month still feels so tender in memory. Every object asked a question about who I had been and who I was willing to become on the road to Santa Fe.
The Path We Choose
In life's grand stage, our roles unfold, No script is written, no future told. With choices made, we carve our way, Each action paints our life's display.
Read it in Echoes: Whispers From The Soul →That made the path feel less abstract and more earned. By the time I left, the choice had already rearranged me. The drive only made visible what April had been doing all along.
April was also when I said some hard goodbyes. I want to say that lightly, and I mean it seriously. The people you love can be in the same city and still require a goodbye when the chapter changes. Relationships have geography, and when you move, some of them change shape. Most of mine adapted. A few contracted in ways I hadn't entirely anticipated. I am at peace with all of it now, which took longer than I'd like to admit but arrived, eventually, the way these things do when you actually do the work instead of scheduling it for later.
The path was real long before I got to drive it. It had been forming in smaller decisions for months: whom I trusted, what kind of daily life I wanted, and how much longer I was willing to confuse endurance with belonging. April 2023 was the month I stopped circling the choice and lived inside it. The boxes, the goodbyes, and the uncertainty all mattered, but they mattered because they were the cost of moving toward the right road.
Find your master key. It's probably somewhere you've already been and stopped paying attention to. Those are almost always the best places to look.