Preparing To Leave

is far more intense than leaving itself (which latter involves walking out the door, hugging rosy, letting the liftman handle your luggage, turning the music in the car way up, and not looking back).

this time around it has brought dinners, lunches, endless cab and bus rides, gmail chat and facebook and email ad infinitum, coffees, last-minute errands like new glasses and backing up data, switching phone lines in advance so that you're wired when you get there, constant to-do-listing, inevitable phone tag with people you want to talk to, a cough and cold of the deflating/debilitating sort you haven't had in years, not much reading, not much family time, not much rest. the constant checking of your ticket to make sure you're flying when you think you are. also: distancing yourself from the right people, and the unsettling feeling that whatever you're doing right now you're doing for the last time in a while.

in the more immediate sense, it means realizing you have way too much jewellery (and how the heck did you fit it all in when you came back last september?) because it takes 25 minutes to pack it all, and hunting frantically for the chess set you got for your birthday last year that sat on a shelf for months, boxed and waiting to be lovingly stared at again one day in good company, and now suddenly cannot be found.

i'll only sleep well on the plane now.

*ah-chhhhooo!!*