Bold Little Swallow

This is the best analogy I can think of to describe my feelings of these past two weeks or so.  I feel like I’m taking all the pieces that make up my life, shedding them off, and giving them away.

I certainly don’t mean to intend that I’m “shedding” the people in my life — I certainly don’t want to do that!  It’s the every day routines and responsibilities that I have been leaving, one by one.  The realization a month ago that I wouldn’t get as much knitting done as I’d hoped to get done before leaving.  The last time I went to the English student’s house to tutor her.  The last invoice I processed a payment for at work.  Cleaning out my personal items from my desk and then looking at it, still set up with office supplies but empty of the plants and other items that made it my little home away from home.  Seeing my colleagues for the last time before I leave.   Seeing my college for the last time before I leave, knowing that when I come back, I will not have the connection to it that I have maintained since walking onto its campus five and a half years ago.

Today, a few friends came over to make Chinese dumplings, a dinner party get-together that happens probably at least once every 1-2 months.  I said something, probably about the food, that was like, “Maybe next time I’ll …”  B gave me a funny look and said, “Next time?”  I realized that if there was going to be a next time with this group of friends, it would be six months from now, and after that, who knows.  And when they left, there was this silence, this emptiness, partially because they are good friends and I don’t like goodbyes, and partially because I felt it was also a goodbye to everything in my current life — and I gotta say, I like my life and most things in it.

I look forward to going to China, but more than that, I look forward to a new routine, another “every day” life to hold on to.  Right now I’m stuck in the land of in-between.