There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir

by Casey Gerald

You see, every journey is really two journeys: a going-to and a going-away. And it’s not until the journey is over that you can see what’s what, because you can’t get away from nothing if you’re looking at it all the time, and you can’t go toward something you see too clearly because if you saw exactly what it was you’d have enough sense not to chase it. So you stand there at the shoreline of decision—maybe you are more desperate to get away than to go anywhere, or more eager to find someplace new than to leave the place you know, but you need both impulses or else you’re in trouble. If all you’ve got is a going-away, you might end up lost, since the only thing on your mind is running. And if all you’ve got is a going-to, you might end up sad because what you find is rarely as good as you thought it would be, unless it’s different from what you imagined, so it helps to remember how awful the thing was that you left. It’s a simple equation, really, and the stranger the journey the better the math works. Just plug in what you were trying to get to and multiply it by what you were trying to get away from, and you’ll understand a hell of a lot more precisely why you did what you did. At least this works for me.