cover by @pacifyherafi / nicole
"Sure, maybe the urban Boston wouldn't be completely socially aware, but they'd at least have some idea of how to treat us like we were all the same. So, we were packing up our bags, and I was going to a new school, a...
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Chapter Sixty Five
For three glorious months, Robin lived out a dream she didn't even know she was capable of living out. Everytime she boarded a plane to go to a new state, an overwhelming feeling of gratefulness and even relief washed over her. She had an amazing team who helped her get from place to place and keep her on her feet, and it wasn't nearly as stressful as she had been expecting. Since she was up and coming, tours didn't have to be fast-paced and full of stress. When she landed somewhere and did all the interviews and tour activities and conferences she still could take in the beauty of where she was.
Granted, her tour was just in the U.S. and she had already been a lot of the places she was touring, but some places were entirely new. And even the places she knew all too well, like Georgia where she lived and held some of her most memorable moments, only to create more in Boston, were the best tour spots. In Georgia she got to remember in the person she was, review herself from the outside, and take it all in. Perhaps the best part though, was the knowledge that change had disrupted her in so many ways, and she wasn't even the same person as she was, despite being born and raised there.
And the change didn't stop just because she was finally achieving her dreams and carrying out every single one of her manifestations. Everytime a young black girl came up to her and told her how the book had impacted her life and inspired her to write her own books or be herself unapologetically, Robin realized this was what she had to do. Not only because she wanted to write, sing and be an artist, but because she needed to continue carrying out her dreams because it gave other people hope. And she saw that these people she was inspiring were the people who needed it most; the black girls who were bullied at school, the black boys who needed an outlet to express their creativity and their needs. So she resolved in her heart, in an unspoken peace treaty with herself, to continue doing exactly what she was doing now and hopefully on an even grander scale in the near future.
Of course she missed her family sometimes, this was the longest she'd gone without seeing them. They came to some of the northeastern tour locations when they could, but obviously they couldn't be with her the whole time. Still, even this didn't stop her from fully experiencing perhaps one of the most life-changing experiences of hers thus far. That was why when she landed in Boston -- this time to live out the last stretch of her dream, not to move there, her dream's manifestation unbeknownst to her -- she felt full. It was a feeling she couldn't explain, not even in the etchings of her journals which would inspire her next book a year later.
She just knew it was a feeling she hadn't had for a while - in the times before when she'd experienced pure happiness, it had been a different type of full, like the way she felt when she had finally found love in life and everything in that prospect of life seems limitless. But this time she was full in every prospect, every area of her life. She literally couldn't even think of a single problem she had or was expecting in that moment. Even the idea of leaving River permanently as she went off to college didn't bother her because their security enveloped her like an iron blanket- she was practically indestructible.
