![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Starting to leave
May. 4th, 2006 08:07 amI feel like I'm already gone; some of it is the weather. This week, it's been vacation weather, warm and clear and slightly windy, and it makes all the places I know into places I'm visiting, preparation-places. It seems like I'm constantly seeing some person or performing some activity for the last time before I leave. It seems like the air is telling me something, but I don't know what, unless it is to ache.
People have teased me, because I'm treating this like it will be so big, holding get-togethers to say poignant goodbyes to friends I'll actually be back in the city with in less than a month. Three weeks is less than a Teen Trip*; most of the people staying here will probably only just have started to miss me when I'm back. Many of them I may have gone that long without seeing, anyway. But it's so large and looming from my perspective that everything afterward is hazy and vague.
(* In time span, obviously; in geography, it's rather more ambitious than any of them. In shape, it's probably the closest thing I've had to one in the five years since the last.)
This will be my first time off this continent since I was too young to remember it. (I remember some things from being one year old, but not my trip to Greece.) Isn't that strange? There's such a gap sometimes between the comfortable reality of my experiences, in which it's cheerful to accept that I am at best a modest traveller, and the fiction-spanning space of my sensibilities, by which I often feel as though I am pretty backwards for never having left my planet.
I leave on Sunday, at 1:35; I'll have left the house by 10. All those who've argued over the likely span may be interested to know that my flight will actually last 9 hours, 45 minutes; my guess of 'ten hours' was pretty much on.
People have teased me, because I'm treating this like it will be so big, holding get-togethers to say poignant goodbyes to friends I'll actually be back in the city with in less than a month. Three weeks is less than a Teen Trip*; most of the people staying here will probably only just have started to miss me when I'm back. Many of them I may have gone that long without seeing, anyway. But it's so large and looming from my perspective that everything afterward is hazy and vague.
(* In time span, obviously; in geography, it's rather more ambitious than any of them. In shape, it's probably the closest thing I've had to one in the five years since the last.)
This will be my first time off this continent since I was too young to remember it. (I remember some things from being one year old, but not my trip to Greece.) Isn't that strange? There's such a gap sometimes between the comfortable reality of my experiences, in which it's cheerful to accept that I am at best a modest traveller, and the fiction-spanning space of my sensibilities, by which I often feel as though I am pretty backwards for never having left my planet.
I leave on Sunday, at 1:35; I'll have left the house by 10. All those who've argued over the likely span may be interested to know that my flight will actually last 9 hours, 45 minutes; my guess of 'ten hours' was pretty much on.
