I start work Monday. I plan to leave here tonight. I promised Em I would be here when she got home from work, and I might head out after that... possibly just to Cincinnati so I can drop off the cat and the plants and spend the night. Mom really wants me to leave from her house.
I am really very sad to be missing the cicadas.
Seventeen years is a long time to wait. If you don't live somewhere that gets cicadas like the plague, you're missing out on a really neat experience. It's just about the most amazing thing that can happen to a seven year old in the suburbs... all the sudden, there are just hundreds and hundreds of these red-eyed "flying" insects everywhere and that noise.
And then they die and it smells really bad.
I spent a lot of time wondering what my life would be like by the time the cicadas came back. I don't think I came to any conclusions, twenty-four is really, really unimaginably old when you're seven.
Well, it turns out, I still don't really know what my life is going to be like when the cicadas come back, but I guess I won't be here. I have some fairly vague plans, a job, the goal of procuring an apartment, obviously I will be single and childless, but really a lot of things are still very uncertain.
"When the cicadas come back" was the most distant, concrete thing in my future for a long time, but I never imagined I'd be so far away when it happened.
This leaving business is fucking hard.
I'm trying not to cry. I don't have time to cry. I don't have time to be writing this really. I have to finish packing, because I didn't really get serious about it until after midnight last night. I made big progress before I accidentally fell asleep on the floor, at least.
I don't know how I'm going to get along so far away from my friends and my family. I don't know how I'm going to get along so far away from Kentucky ("where the sun shines bright and the grass is blue" and Kentuckians ("It's that friendly!").
I'm going to go live somewhere with palm trees. I'm going to smell like sunscreen indefinitely. I'm starting a new job. I have to find an apartment. It's flat there. And brown. I don't know where to buy cheap cigarettes. I don't know where the grocery store is. I don't know anything abotu the city really. And my friends are here.
I woke up this morning on my bedroom floor with my head in a box, showing the first signs of a pretty severe chest cold. This is going to make driving 2,000 miles in the next few days just so much more fun.
I don't really have a point here, and I have to go investigate the boxes of extra kitchen stuff in the garage. I just wanted to say that this is the hardest thing, but I'm doing it.
