As the year came to a close, I faced something I thought I had prepared for, only to realize I wasn’t truly ready to experience it. It’s hard to describe the weight of knowing something is inevitable, yet still feeling completely unprepared when it happens.
The very next day, I boarded a plane to Boston and spent New Year’s Eve suspended midair over the Atlantic Ocean, en route to a stop in Istanbul before catching my next flight.
Flooded with emotions, somewhere between time zones, in the middle of a crowded flight filled with loud conversations, crying children, and barking dogs, I was reflecting on the contradictions of it all.
When had the year officially ended? When had the new one begun? I felt adrift in an in-between space, caught between endings and beginnings, past and future.
The long layover in Istanbul only deepened the surreal feeling. In the airport of a city where East meets West, where cultures intersect and coexist, I found myself surrounded by dualities I couldn’t escape.
In the midst of it all, I kept thinking about my mom – her love, her strength, the ways she influenced me, and all the memories she left with me. Endings and beginnings, despair and hope, all intertwined, shaping the road ahead.
Without being too dramatic, it felt like something straight out of Charles Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities:
[…] it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.