I wanted to leave. Then I missed it.

The Chicago photograph looks composed. Black vest, gray trousers, standing outside a building. The caption is much less composed. That is probably why I like the two together.

I had asked Draven to take the photographs before leaving. There was a version of the story that could have stopped at the picture: a clean frame of someone heading into the next chapter. The words let the uncertainty stay in. I wanted the experience. Wanting it did not remove the people and animals I would miss.

And then it became ordinary life.

There are chairlift photographs, the pink board, snow at night, and people gathered outside. The things I had imagined became things I could photograph because I was actually there. In the January entry, the strange part was how fast it already felt.

A season can be full and somehow feel short. There is the view I wanted to see, and then there are all the people standing just outside that original picture in my head. The photographs bring them in: on the lift, outside at night, between the runs.

The leaving goes both ways.

I had been thinking about what I would miss before I went. Later, I was missing the people I met by going. That is not a failure of the dream. It is one of the things the dream gave me: another place, another group of people, another reason that leaving was not simple.

I do not want this chapter edited into a clean “take the leap” lesson. There was uncertainty before it, real life inside it, and a little ache after it. The version with all three feels closer to the photographs.

One later detail I want to keep.

I like that the whole season can sit beside this much smaller beginning: me at a desk, late, thinking about boarding and filling out applications. The room photograph does not look like a life-changing decision. The photographs that follow it are full of what that decision made possible.