Nobody warns you about the glow.

People talk about holidays themselves.

The excitement before. The packing. The travelling. The photographs.

Then they talk about coming home.

The washing. The unpacking. The return to normal life.

Nobody talks about the strange little space that exists between those two things.

The holiday glow.
I noticed it almost immediately.

We were home.
The suitcases were unpacked. The fridge was restocked. The caravan keys had been handed back.

Everything should have felt normal again.
But it didn’t.

Part of me was still standing on a cliff.
Part of me was still watching waves crash against chalk.
Part of me was still looking for puffins.

For days afterwards, memories kept appearing without warning.

A particular view.
A smell.
The sound of seabirds.
The feeling of rain hitting my face sideways because Yorkshire weather had decided umbrellas were for cowards.

The memories arrived like little postcards from a version of me that had only existed a week earlier.

And every single one carried the same message.

You did it.

That was the surprising part.

The glow wasn’t really about the holiday.
It was about what the holiday represented.

For twenty years, I had quietly built my life around certainty.
Not intentionally.
Not dramatically.
Just gradually.

One careful decision at a time.

The holiday challenged that.

It asked me to tolerate uncertainty. To tolerate change. To tolerate not knowing exactly what would happen next.
And somehow, I did.

Not perfectly.
Not comfortably.
But successfully.

That knowledge followed me home.

Every time I remembered the cliffs.
Every time I remembered the caravan.
Every time I remembered getting into that taxi despite wanting to stay where it felt safe.

The glow wasn’t happiness exactly.
It was evidence.

Evidence that my world had become bigger.
Evidence that fear wasn’t always a stop sign.
Evidence that I was capable of more than I had believed.

That feeling stayed with me long after the holiday ended.

Perhaps that is why coming home felt bittersweet.

Not because I wanted to leave my life behind.

Because for one week, I had discovered another version of it.

A version that included cliff paths, sea air, ridiculous puffins and possibilities I had stopped imagining.

The holiday ended.

The glow remained.

And every time it returns, it whispers the same thing.

You can go again.

— Frost ❄️