Published on my personal blog.

I always struggle to come to terms with endings, even when they’re welcome. I don’t think anyone would argue that 2016 was a perfect year. When we look back, we will remember Turkey and Nice and Syria. We will remember Brexit and the U.S. election that cultivated tension all across the country. We will remember Keith Lamont Scott and Prince and the countless others whose high profile deaths left millions shell-shocked. Twenty-sixteen was nothing if not eventful, and many people will have felt the aftershocks of a draining year that left them counting down the hours until 2017. Even still, we are left with prevailing hope for the future.

It was a big year for me, too. Even without the experiences I shared with the rest of the world, I went through so many life changes within twelve months that I still have trouble recounting everything that happened. Last January feels eons away, and the girl who maneuvered those early days of 2016 feels like a stranger, someone I once knew but haven’t spoken to in years. It’s hard for me to eloquently describe the ways my world changed in 366 days (thanks a lot, leap year), but I found myself looking for ways to commemorate perhaps the craziest times of my life.

Perhaps I’ll measure the year with too many tickets. For busses and trains and metros and planes. For a palace opera, for a Beyoncé concert, for a Yom Kippur service, for a graduation ceremony, for art and history museums. I keep them tucked inside books so that someday I will stumble upon them again and the memories will come rushing back. I’ll remember the excitement that bubbled in my stomach as I stared down from airplane windows and how I lost myself in the high-pitched vibrato of La Traviata. I’ll remember wondering, time and time again, if I was living in a dream. I’ll remember waking up in new places and feeling like a new person, how foreign streets became familiar with each passing day. I’ll remember how I kept my suitcase permanently packed and ready, how I lived a life untethered, uncertain of the future but happy with it all the same.

Read more of the story here.