Less than a Fortnight
I'm an English major. I have a right to use the word 'fortnight' in at least one out of 190 posts.
So here we stand, two weeks to go (damn these countdowns... my body clock is too in tune with the moon or something), and having just completed the last of Luther finals (International Studies 135, a year-long course rooted in British history and travel), It's getting tough.
Time is interesting. Broad statement, yes, but true. I can remember dreading Nottingham- lying in the basement at home, wondering if I'd made the biggest mistake of my life- thinking, Well damnit, there's no turning back.... one year of your life at Luther, in the US, one year gone.... I counted down, knowing that 'in one month, I'll be in another country' or 'shit, 12 hours from now, I'll be on a bus to O'Hare, headed to a plane, headed to England'. It's wild how the mind works, how time flies, and how it can work against you. The same way I feared the finality and inevitability of Nottingham 9 months ago, I now fear re-entry.
While usually I question the use of loaded words or overdramatic phrasing, i think Fear fits. Fear that I will have changed too much. Fear that I'll want things to have remained static, and they will have changed as well. Fear that I will only now realize how much I've missed, or, by the same token regret how much I didn't take advantage of. Again, overdramatic is the name of the game, but with two weeks to study for one test and write one massive paper, my mind has time to wander. And wander it has.
Last night, in studying our old itineraries from travel, the gang reminisced and talked over each other in ways that I never could have imagined 9 months ago. It's cheesy, it's cutesy, but for 9 people (who for all intensive purposes) would have never come in contact at Luther, we've become tight. No time in my life have I ever been this exposed, this cramped, this positively clostrophobically jammed, with 8 other people.
Even at home, with family, there's school to offer refuge, weekends out with friends- here, we are the school, we are the friends. I mean this with no disrespect, no negativity. The same way mothers experience a kind of postpartum depression at the end of 9 months, I can't imagine waking up and not seeing these guys, going longer than 4 days without some kind of Notter contact. Mark and Carol are our surrogate parents, and we're all dysfunctional siblings.
Time to cut the cord. Give it a week or two.
posted by Kevin @ 11:09 AM
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