A little earlier today, while having a pleasant conversation with the optometrist as he probed searing lights into my eyes, it hit me: in exactly fifteen days and four hours I am getting on a plane without even the comfort of family, friends, teachers, authority figures or distant acquaintances, flying further away from home than I have ever, ever been, getting off that plane, waiting two hours, getting on another plane, flying even further away from home, and landing, hopefully in one piece, though I’m not counting on it, in Florence, Italy where I will be spending the next few months of my existence. (Insert frantic scream here).
After taking several deep, cleansing breaths, and staring through new and vision-twisting contact lenses at all the different eye glass frames that I was not planning to purchase, I had managed to get this profound and terrifying realization suitably crammed into the Hazardous Waist Containment section of my brain, and went about the rest of my morning sojourn into the big city in peace and contentment — after almost losing my glasses in the eye doctor’s sitting area, and getting on the wrong highway home, twice.
Because that’s how freak out moments go, isn’t it? We panic for about two seconds, until we feel like we can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t go on with anything in the rest of our lives so we have to repress it, stamp it down, and keep moving, closer and closer to the thing we fear most. Then we hit that moment, the moment we dread — the moment the plane leaves good old terra firma, lifting up into thin, invisible air and you realize that you’re trapped inside this metal coffin for seven hours with no chance of escape if it decides to take a nose dive into oblivion. It’s enough to make you want to quit sometimes, these freak out moments, to curl up in your nice, warm bed and never do anything new. It’s enough to make you okay with the idea of dying.
But what I live for, what makes life worth living at all, is the moment after the freak out, the moment after the moment when the plane takes off, the moment that you realize that yes it may have been one hundred percent every bit as bad as you expected, but it’s over now, and if you let it, it could give you wings.
I think I’m still freaking right now. The adrenalin rush hasn’t warn off yet, at least. And I fully expect to be freaking right up until the plane lands back in Chicago three months from now and I run frantically into my mother’s arms screaming “home at last, thank-you God!” But I know that one day in the future I will look back on these moments and they won’t be tangible anymore. They’ll just be memories. And I will have survived them all. Well, if my plane doesn’t fall from the sky to crash and burn in the ocean, that is.
Anyway, since the purpose of this blog is mainly, for now, to keep my family, friends, relatives, and anyone else who may happen to stop by, updated about what I’m doing off in that other country across the sea, I thought this an appropriate place to begin. Consider this my first freak out moment (it’s actually the second, but who’s counting). Don’t worry, it only gets worse from here.
Until next time . . .
August 14, 2009 at 7:53 pm |
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