I live in a town of 2,000 inhabitants. My home is up on a hill and I must trek through dirt and rain to get to the comfort of my home. I see the ocean from my window, and I tend to jump inside of her waters everyday. 

I should have no complaints, but sadly it hasn’t all been easy here. Mostly, I am struggling with an inner battle. With a fight inside of myself. To accept that I am growing up. I have suffered in trying to resist that my emotional and more importantly, my spiritual maturity is surpassing my age. I feel my soul is far older than my body. 

And so I have noticed my life becoming more adult like, with more profundity and less of that feeling you gave me, that choices had no consequences. 

So like the Banyan trees surrounding me, This is where I am—I am rooting.

I still crave the flight of traveling and I still arrange plans to adventure, but I am doing it differently now and the change, though beautiful, is hard to accept. 

Maturity is a beautiful thing, yet it is so hard to embrace the changes in our colors. I think of the fruits growing in my yard and I see how the papaya begins to change colors and taste differently as they alter themselves.

  At first the fruit changes in size, but as we know with the end of our own adolescence—there is only so much growing that can be done externally.

And then, as the papaya hangs upon the tree the size she is meant to be—she begins to change in essence. She is hard and almost impenetrable when unripe, and as she gains warm colors on her skin, she becomes lusciously edible. I want to learn to accept when my green papaya skin begins to have tints of yellow, and I want to be even more ready to turn entirely orange. To become the sweetest I can become, the most edible by what is beyond mankind. 

If only you could see the woman you made me to be, my Italy.