Ciao

It's been a busy time here with head full of the minutia and limbs busy with the tasks of preparing to move abroad.  This weekend, visiting with my family, I started to get a little sad.  I have cried, I will cry some more.  It seems to be the way I roll, how I commemorate major transitions in life.  It's hotter than I hope it will be on the day we leave.  I worry about that and its possible impact on Baloo's ability to travel with me but it will be what it will be.

When I write, there's a natural rhythm, an ebb and flow.  I haven't (yet) imposed any discipline to my writing, schedule or content wise but it's something I admire in other writers.  However you go about it though, I think all writers wonder how long they should keep on with one project or another, what is a lull versus a sign to move on, etc., and then one day, you know.  You know because you stop wringing your hands about it.  This feels like the last post and I just want to tell you everything I've been writing in my head over the last month or so even though that's impossible.  I want to tell you about today and the letter I read from my grandfather to my father on the occasion of my father's 21st birthday, a letter we just learned existed, a letter still moving through me a bit and making me a little weepy and wishing my grandfather were still alive.  I want to tell you about the man I like and wax eloquent once again about how he'll never be mine or how it wouldn't work out for one reason or another in the tight vacuum of my imagination I always create for these types of things.  I think I'm getting a little better at risking rejection and trading experience over imagination with regard to potential romance but proximity does not serve me with this latest guy so daydream fodder he must be.

When I have been writing, I've been starting (still) unfinished and unpublished treatises on friendship which are really just open letters to specific people I am unwilling to engage directly with.  If I'm being as honest as I try to be with myself here, my reluctance to engage isn't distaste for confrontation, or fear, or even a feeling that the emotional investment in an argument/discussion outstrips my actual investment in the friendship.  I just don't believe talking about it will change anything--more accurately, I don't believe talking about *should* change anything.  We spend our lives contorting to conform to one expectation or another, I don't believe friends should have to try to change who they are with one another and it's okay to discover that you're not as compatible as you initially were or thought you were.  It's like all those romantic comedies where everything is perfectly ok between two people and then the 'one-true-love' enters the scene and it's time to break it off with Mr/Ms perfectly-fine-but-not-for-me.  Since we're allowed to have more than one friend, the challenge is minimal and and really only a challenge with those who are on a different wavelength with regard to how close you actually are and levy BFF requirements and expectations on a relationship that is really in the casual to close acquaintance zone.  My thoughts on this don't lend themselves to clear expression in writing but short story long,  friendship at it's best is a refuge from all of that.

In 48 hours or so, we take to the sky and start a new adventure.  I'm nervous about the logistics of getting there, hopeful that Baloo will make it okay, and already missing my family.  I'm so fortunate to have the family and friends I have.  I'm so grateful that my Mom is here, that her and my father finally get to enjoy everything they have worked for together.  My sister is here, hanging with me in this shitty hotel room (it really is awful--there was something that could have been vomit on the elevator last night) making me a little weepy.  My Dad came over to help me yesterday and told me he was sad but also a little jealous of the adventure that awaits me and Baloo.  I think my Mom is just sad.  My brother wants to come out to party (not holding my breath), and I already have a queue of visitors just waiting for me to set up house so they can experience this next chapter with me.  My Soul Twin will be one time zone away and all the rest of my friends will be short flights away by the fall.  My language has degenerated back to polite phrases and semi-memorized passages about global warming and capital punishment but I'm not sweating it right now.  I just learned yesterday that peanut butter is not really a staple there as it is here and I almost wanted to go MIA.

I don't know if I'll be back to this space in the near term but my 3 loyal readers and especially Lodo and Teresa, I won't leave you hanging.  Your patronage and comments made this blog what it was/is for me.  I had a friend in high school who never said goodbye because you never know what the future holds.  Instead she would say 'see you later' so friends, I shall see you later.