closing

Remember ten years ago, when that song Closing Time came out? If you're close to my age, you probably had it recorded faithfully on at least three different mix tapes. It ran through my head almost constantly today as we power-cleaned the now-empty A Ward.

Closing time, open all the doors and let you out into the world.
Closing time, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here.
Closing time, time for you to go out to the places you will be from.
Closing time, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Three weeks from today I will walk down the gangway and into a Mercy Ships car. We'll be in Tenerife by then, so we'll drive on pothole-free roads to the airport where I'll get on a plane and I'll fly home. And just like that, Liberia will be nothing but a memory, forty-five hundred miles away from the family I'll be winging my way towards.

I can't wait to see them. I don't want to leave. Bring on the paradox. (Which, I'm realizing, is exactly what I typed the night before I left home in February. Oh, how my paradigm has shifted.)

I'm probably going to beat this feeling to death over the next few weeks, but this leaving is so bittersweet. I know I'll be coming back for Benin, so when I disembark it'll be with the assurance that it's not forever. But when the ship sails from Liberia, I don't know if I'll ever return, and I don't know how to come to terms with that. I love so much about this country.

I can't stay here. I have to go out from this place and back into the world, and I'm scared.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.