extreme flight risk

upon arriving in the airport
she got her bags & met the members of her family
who had come to meet her---
she had the small talk as they
made their way to the car that they all had
crammed themselves into,
in order to make it on time to meet her.

the excitement in the eyes of her parents
reveal all the comfort of reunion
which understandably brings them happiness &
in their overlapping questions,
their interest in the time away that their daughter has spent
seems like an interrogation of sorts.

her own attitude is negative,
for she had moved to the city in order to take advantage of all it
had to offer,
and after years of struggling,
she was unable to make ends meet---
all the time spent earning her degrees &
all the networking she’d done
seemed to wash away down the river,
as she packed & made her way back to her parents’ house.

she gets behind the wheel of her mother’s car &
drives through the town in which she grew up,
but now, a decade later,
all that is left are the buildings &
though she can still remember the times spent with her friends &
that brings her joy,
she has no friends now in the little town &
she feels as if she has fallen backward
to the starting point again.

if she sees this new predicament as a prison
she will grow more angry with each passing hour &
her inability to develop new relationships in her life
based on this well of anger inside
(aimed at herself through an overwhelming sense of
failure),
will only make it more difficult to get through the days
until she is able to establish a new strategy or goal
which may give her purpose again &
hopefully move her to a happier place in her life
regardless of where she physically resides---
for now,
she is an extreme flight risk---
for now,
at the drop of a hat, she might take whatever savings she has left,
buy a plane ticket to the furthest place possible &
jump aboard,
without looking back.