It’s hard to believe the life I’ve had these past three months. Even though I’m a day removed and back across the Atlantic Ocean, everything seems so surreal, as if I’ve been describing a dream. The details seem so vivid now but I know they will eventually fade into memories, emotions, and sights melding together into a sentiment of the past.

What will become of me now that I’ve seen and done so much? What parts of me have changed without me realizing it yet? The future looks so mysterious now. My heart aches for the adventure of it all over again but my body is weary and ready to recover. Being home is exactly that bittersweet happiness I was expecting – what will I do here, now that I’ve amassed all this knowledge and experience?

No matter how well I describe the trip to my friends and family, they will never truly know that life I had on the other side of the globe. How many things have I forgotten to share? But perhaps that is for the best. I’ll keep my thought and experiences within these pages and within my journal so that my memory will never tarnish completely, a piece of my twenty year old self preserved forever here. I already know that my life has bettered itself from these three months, and I cannot wait to see where it will lead me, how these encounters I have just described will affect all the paths before me now.

What will be the next journey for Grace’s Places?