Two More Days

Went to Tallahassee for the last real visit. Taking a couple of days to think this trip over for myself has helped immensely. I was all caught up with my friend in the portion I’ll be sharing with him, and I wasn’t even real sure how I felt about the rest of it. I knew it was coming up, and that I had to take some time to get my head sorted about it, but I wasn’t doing that. I always get so agitated when I don’t have time to consider how I feel about big, exciting life changes.

I’m beginning to realize that the time-fairy doesn’t come grant you those hours, you have to carve them out for yourself. So often I compare my level of contemplativeness to when I was about nineteen, which isn’t fair to myself. At that age, that year, I really didn’t have anything to do but take mythology and creative writing classes, and sit on my ass and think. Obviously I reached a level of self-reflection that I just couldn’t attain in the last five years or so, taken up as it has been with finishing my Associates degree, getting into art school, enduring my boot-camp first year of that, and getting prepared for this journey. In there also was my relationship with Rance, someone so similar and yet so different from me, that it distracted me from myself.

I’ve accomplished so much in the last six years. You would just have to know me to know how different I am now, how much more purposeful, capable, just how much farther along in the “real world”. But you also would have to have known me then, to know how the lack of an intense inner life has hurt me for a long while. I’ve done what I unconsciously set out to do in 2000, which was to turn my life around. The headspace and lifestyle that got me from there to here is not going to work with what I now want to go on and do. Big changes are in effect, in how I see the world, in what story I tell myself about what I’m seeing, in how I choose what action to take. I want to get back to my old way of being, of living life deeply and recording it thoroughly. This skimming of the surface and sketching out the details is necessary when you’ve got a goal in mind, and are trying to catch up with where you think you ought to be. But I’m caught up now. Time to shift gears back to what feels most true and right for me.

Two more days after today until I leave America, to go live in a foreign country for awhile. No, in no way did I think this is how it would turn out. I had vague hopes that someday…but to have my truest wishes so concretely satisfied–no, I’m not wasting this time with to-do lists and grim determination. Let it all go to hell, my degree, my worldly ambitions, all my structures.

I want this to turn me inside out.

Last Week in America

Countdown’s standing at five days until I get on the plane for Paris, bound for a year abroad. What could I possibly do to my brain to make it grasp this reality? I’ve tried repeated dosages (some quite large) of Yuengling beer and Diablo wine, I’ve tried taking it out in numerous checklists, and I’ve tried ripping up the checklists and just burying my face in my cat’s soft grey fur. I’d like to take my brain out, blow on it, shake it a few times, stick it back in and see if it’ll jump start.

After a spring of applying to the study abroad program (as well as my Painting department) and a summer of alternately lolling around listening to Mofro and frantically running trip-related errands, it seems I’ve finally reached a deer-in-the-headlights mind-numbness about it. I’ve played the same fantasies in my head so often of how it’s going to be over there, that the mental pictures don’t excite me anymore, and anyways I’m bone-weary of preparation. But at the same time, I’m panic-stricken at the thought that it’s about to really begin. I don’t feel ready, but I’m tired of getting ready. Can you tell that there’s been a emotional roller-coaster aspect to this adventure?

I do feel certain, though, that once I get in the truck to ride with my dad to the airport, my natural love for new things will take over, and give me the rush it’ll take to move out of this fog. Maybe I’m clinging to my boredom now, because I know instinctively how exciting everything is about to get!