It was a beautiful morning. The sunrise washed the fields in hues of pink, the birds were singing a song I seldomly hear and the breeze was soft.

Working nightshifts at our small town‘s hospital caused me to usually sleep through it, eyes barely staying open for long enough to guide me home.

In fact, this may be the first time since I‘ve lived here that I saw the sunrise in the countryside.

First and last time, I realised, for my boxes where already loaded into a moving truck and my suitcases packed. Seeing this dreamy view stirred something in me, regret that tasted like bile in my throat and a pang of loss in my chest.

This mixture was something I‘ve gulped down a few times before, like the bitter expensive medicine you buy because it was prescribed to you, which doesn‘t work but you still take, because what else will you do?

I forced it down when we left my childhood home for a smaller house in a bigger city, the sound of cars becoming a companion that I hadn‘t had to endure before. Then, it visited again when I left my highschool to enter adulthood and with it enter a life devoid of my parents. The loss here wasn‘t bidding goodbye to schoolfriends, but the relieved look my mom wore with the knowledge that she‘d been relieved of her role as a caretaker.

I too gained knowledge that day, that I had lost something which had been hanging on by a thread and that I could love people that could never love me back and yet stay missing them with each step I take without them.

This house was something I loved too. It was the first place I had to myself, the first thing that would greet me without fail. So it hurt, hurt more than leaving the temporary comfort of highschool, hurt more than just moving houses.

It was so great a loss that it made me choke, filled me like stale air and it made me truly wonder, what am I, if not defined by loss? It is not like I saught it out, craving to leave things and people behind, but when has the world ever been so kind as to accomodate that.

From the corner of my eye I saw a child. One I knew well, for its parents loved it in the same way mine did me and as such I felt the responsibility to care for it in a way I never was.

In the mornings when I came back from a shift and it sat on the porch with no cars in the garage, I knew to walk with it to school so it wouldn‘t feel the loss of something it never had when seeing other kids walk with their friends.

In the evenings when I got ready and saw it on the porch again, alone, no cars in the garage, I knew to prepare a bigger dinner than I usually would in case it was hungry.

With my leaving, it too could feel a great loss, I realised.

Loss was something that you couldn‘t escape, but you could embrace it, for it shows that you had something, and that something would come back, even if in a different form.

It comes and it goes, and wades with you through the mud of life, arriving and leaving with the tides.

So when I looked back at the sunrise, I let myself smile. Yes, it was a shame that I couldn’t have watched it more often while I had the chance too. But the sun will rise in other places. It will be the same sun and it will drench everything in pink like it did just now. I may leave this town, but it would not leave me for as long as it shines and dims in my memories.