Two weeks

This time two weeks from now I will be on a plane on my way to Japan. How messed up is that?

I seriously can't handle that. The immediacy of my departure is really starting to hit home, and I am realizing more and more than my agenda prior to leaving is quickly becoming very much filled up and very much important in every aspect to accomplish immediately. Which sucks, because it means that I am going to have a very hectic two weeks. It means that I am never going to get to relax, not from now until like a month after I get settled in in Japan. Ugh. Oh well.

I have to pack all my shit. Not only do I have to pack all my shit but I have to sort through all of it and throw away or donate or sell almost all of it in the process. And not just the stuff I use on an everyday basis, but everything I own. Everything in my room that I held on to since I was a little kid and said "This is the kind of stuff I am going to want to hold onto forever" like the notes that I got from ex girlfriends, and the bottle trophies I kept from freshman year college. Things like that. The drawer fulls of old fireworks and prisms and cigarette boxes. The decade old unused condoms I stashed away just in case my 13 year old ass found myself in need. The porn I hid between drawers, which, I suppose I don't really need to get rid of because they're so well hid, but probably should because who knows what kind of renovation they might do in there.

I have to get all my stuff in order, plan my going away party, make sure I have enough money for my plane ticket, see my friends and say my goodbyes. I have a lot of those to say, which is good. I have trips to several cities to make, and a lot of things I need to say to a lot of people which I will either never see again, or whose lives will be so very different when I get back. There are people who I need to tell just how I feel about them, like the girl who every time I see I just fall head over heels for a little bit more but don't know how to tell.

I have to touch up on my Japanese, I have to relearn what it is to live in the biggest city in the world. But most of all I have to prepare myself psychologically to leave this place behind. To leave this life I've been living all these years and all this summer behind. I have to prepare myself to leap into not only something foreign to me but something which is very much dynamic, and very much fast paced. I am going to arrive there, settle in , and the next day start in on training to teach english, and all the things they hired me to do. And somehow, some way I have to handle that all in stride, I have to settle in and start in on it like it's somehow not a big deal. Which, knowing myself, I'm fully capable of, but am nonetheless nervous and a little bit apprehensive about.

All these things are running through my head, and honestly I don't know what I am going to do about them all. I suppose my only option is to just buckle down and start doing things, bug no matter how hard I try to get a handle on them I just can't get over the fact that no matter what I do and how much I get things in order there are always going to be those few things that I didn't think of, that one bill or that one friendship that I took so much for granted that I didn't even bother to think that I would still have to think about it once I left.

I wish that I could leave here with an absolutely clean slate, but no, I have credit card debt and college loans and insurance and friendships and all manner of things which of course I will never even consider until I am long gone. Ugh, I know it is going to take me a long while to really get everything settled in. And I console myself with this one thing: After I do get settled in, the only things I will have held on to are those things which are so important I couldn't leave them behind. In the biggest, most meaningful way possible, I will have trimmed the fat of my life forever, and I will never have to look back on those things I abandoned. I just hope those things don't include friendships or people about whom I genuinely care.