Photo: Nate Lee, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
After the engagement ended
I pointed my little Mazda east
and started driving.
Pennsylvania highways
unspooled beneath me
like a dare.
In Philadelphia
I walked through rooms
where men once argued themselves
into a country.
The Liberty Bell
carried its crack
like proof
that even symbols break.
I slept in a room
of stacked metal bunk beds
strangers breathing softly
above and below me—
everyone resting inside
someone else’s story.
Morning smelled like coffee
and courage.
Strangers became friends
over beer and sunlight—
travel bends
the rules of loneliness.
That night
in a crowded bar
I sang karaoke
for the first and only time:
“Fergalicious”—
badly
and bravely.
I discovered courage
sometimes sounds ridiculous.
In Washington
cherry blossoms drifted
quiet confetti
welcoming me in.
I walked the long green stretch
of the National Mall
past monuments,
past museums full of flight
and American dreams.
At the Lincoln Memorial
I cried for reasons
I still cannot name.
But the moment that mattered
arrived quietly.
Beneath a tree
near the Washington Monument
I gazed at the pale stone needle
stitching the sky
to the earth.
And I understood
something simple.
I had done it.
The miles behind me were real.
The fear had been wrong.
Somewhere inside my ribs
something shifted—
small,
cosmic,
permanent.
I drove home
carrying a version of myself
I hadn’t met yet.
Sarah Gill is a poet based in Oklahoma. Her work explores memory, emotional inheritance, and the relationship between place and identity. She is currently building a manuscript and submitting to literary journals.