The series of events leading up to the most important footstep I would ever take seems like a blur. Almost a million miles away. Hazy. As if everything and everyone in the life from which I fell happened to somebody else entirely, while I sat and watched on like one would their favorite film. Alas, I can say for certain that I am no spectator and this has been no Hollywood adaptation. The very idea couldn't be further from the truth.
Indeed, I know for a fact that I was born on September 26th, 1988 to my parents, Nicolas and Jane Hale, and got my namesake from a little show called "I Love Lucy."
I know that my mother died in a car accident shortly after my sixth birthday while coming home from work one night in a torrential downpour.
I know that in the summer of 1999, while vacationing in Florida, I was bit by a lemon shark as I swam in the shallows of the Gulf.
And I know my first kiss was Ben Turner, who took it upon himself to declare his love for me in the middle of an empty classroom, while we attempted to disassemble our eighth grade science fair projects.
I know these things because I can still feel them within me. The same way in which I feel this place. In my bones. To my core.
I know that it is no illusion. No dream. No story in a book. No lie.
The Shire. Bilbo. The dwarves.
The cuts. Scrapes. Bruises.
Love. Heartache. Fear.
Improbable or not, each has been as real as the next, and just as genuine as anything else I have ever experienced back from where I started. Quite honestly, I don't know how it happened or why, but that it began in the darkness of a cellar in the home of one Eloise Hobbs.
And that nothing would ever be the same again.