Tomorrow

Tomorrow I am moving to Costa Rica. Teaching yoga here. I am freaking out.

I wrote this a little while ago, but I think it still applies:

This apprehension toward leaving, the gloom and tear of it, it isn't about my fear of flying. It isn't about my arguments with embassies, about my brazen lack of cash or my forgotten vocabulary. This isn't about how I almost fell in love, in Boston, and with Boston, and what it means to be 20-something on your own and suspended in the net of an American city. This isn't about my lack of imagination toward the future- I know it will be glorious, overflowing with large birds and ripe fruit and salt in my hair, seeds between my teeth.

It's about the calendared leaves. The hollow, living oak tree with an ecosystem of mycellium expressing its fecundity in wild and grotesque profusions. About the groundhog in all his rodent dignity galumphing across the lawn. The trees I sang songs to, made promises with, the grape vines of concord grapes and how I mixed them with mud to plaster the walls of a home I built with sticks. It's about the river dried to fox prints in the mud, among the glass and dead people's trash grown valuable with rust and mystery. The prey of my extreme imagination as a child. It's about how I belong to this land and it's a part of me and I am leaving, and it is for sale.

My bedroom is still the belonging of a 16-year-old. And maybe someone new will be living there by the time I will return, maybe tomorrow is the last day I set foot in the house I grew up in but I already don't belong here anymore. It's just a museum of who I used to be, someone I'm so far away from now that I miss her. But leaving my home is hard. And leaving everyone I know, also difficult. Which is funny, because I remember high school. I remember walking in through the big doors in the morning and being totally stifled by the drudge and crushing boredom of my daily life. Trying to perk myself up, I reminded myself that spectacular and out-of-the-ordinary things can happen all the time. And maybe this day one of them would. And HWRHS always disappointed. But I'm about to launch myself (albeit kicking and screaming) into the spectacular dream life that drops jaws every time I tell someone my plan, and so I hope if nothing else, that 16-year-old is grateful for all the excitement so long overdue.

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I keep feeling like I didn't have enough time here, which is funny because I had always meant to leave in September. There was so much I meant to do, places I meant to go, food I meant to cook, art I meant to make. Here's the thing: I didn't live these last 5 months of my life with the sad seriousness of leaving. I lived them as carelessly as I always live, which is to say, I did my best.