wise words.

[from the eldest.]

"What I'm supposed to do next. It's still dramatically undecided. See, that's all that we really want. Security, comfort, the desire to be desired and the need to know. There is that part of me that recognizes how safe security is, yet it's giving up the discovery of travel. Yet with the background, you have seen too much. Now you are tainted, so you can never stay content in that safe world painted by our fathers. We are expected to go there, even if its a contradiction. Many will smile and congratulate you on your joy ride, proclaiming how lucky you are! Certainly you will have had a "once in a lifetime experience!" And swearing they will miss you while you are gone. You know better, now. You try to stay, and quickly see that's not the formula. You've done your time. Your 3 months, 2 days. You've played. "Played." But you can't jump the wrong way and stay. You CAN'T. Don't you see, it's not the formula. You won't be able to get back in. Or you will, but nothing will have changed except you, and you can't inject the others with that. So you will make your choice: you will return to a haven of familiarity and enclosed and repressed discoveries, memories locked away and visited privately. Or, you will go. You will forget the rest, forget their weird looks incapable of connection or identification, ignore maybe a hint of jealousy at their security (of course YOU are jealous of THEM), and carry on to the better but more difficult place where you will be more satisfied. But it's only because you know. And what would have happened if you had never known?"

-JR