I put myself in a foreign place.
I felt my stomach clench.
I recognized this
and shifted my thoughts from
“I am afraid” to “I am feeling afraid.”
(I’m not sure if it helped really.)
I remembered times when,
expecting the worst,
I only experienced the
not so bad
or even
the more than pleasant.
I shifted my thoughts --
the clenching stomach
meant I was about to experience something
I hadn’t,
like a first kiss
or lover’s touch.
And so I stepped
more fully
into the foreign
and decided to call it
an adventure.