It started with Jesse.
My Uber driver from the apartment to the Sioux Falls airport.
Big smile, gentle voice — the kind of guy you trust before you know why.
As we pulled away from home, he told me he had spent a month in England.
His eyes lit up — not the casual kind of “yeah, it was cool” — but the kind that says
it changed something in me.
Then he said this:
“I told my wife…
if I die, you need to cremate my ashes
and sprinkle me throughout the sea in England.”
He wasn’t joking.
He said it plainly.
Like someone who had already made peace with it.
That stuck with me.
Jesse wasn’t just talking about a trip.
He was talking about belonging.
About returning.
About knowing where a piece of your soul lives — even if your body hasn’t caught up yet.
And maybe that’s what this whole thing is.
Not a vacation.
Not a fling with another city.
But a reunion.
A quiet, magnetic pull back to something I’ve never seen but always felt.
Funny, how strangers sometimes hand you the first page of your own story.
Jesse, man…
you might have just named the entire arc.