Decision.

I’m now down to days instead of weeks. Our apartment is overcrowded—my roommate T---, who came back into town earlier than anticipated, is sleeping on the couch and come Friday night (when I will hopefully be all packed up, my rented piano in the living room replaced by all the boxes I’ll be shipping out) we’ll switch places. I thought about spending the weekend sleeping at my Grandma’s house in Bountiful, but since I would really like to spend time with people this weekend I think it would be too much hassle to drive up and back and up and back, especially since I’ll get my fill of driving next week.

I’m not particularly looking forward to the couch, if only because it means I cannot go to bed until everyone else has. I suppose I could just put myself through the two hour time change early and keep late hours for the weekend. My sleeping schedule is already messed up after a weekend in St. George with friends and a couple nights of watching movies just a bit later than I am used to. I may as well just resign myself to a few more late nights and early mornings and hope I can get plenty of sleep once I get out of Provo.

I’ve finally gotten around to packing (or re-packing). My room is a disaster and it’s only going to get worse, which is frustrating to me. My desk and floor may occasionally be strewn with papers and books and running clothes, but I like knowing that I can straighten everything up when I have the time. I feel a bit helpless at the moment because I have to pick my way through my room, and because I have no desk space whatsoever, and because I know there is absolutely nothing I can do about this for several days. I also realized that the clutter in my room is probably one of the reasons I have been living with a sort of panicky feeling in the back of my head for weeks now, and if it doesn’t help to get rid of the worry, at least it’s slightly comforting to understand the source.

Leaving still does not feel real. I don’t think it will until I actually get to Ann Arbor, see my new apartment, attend orientation and my new ward. In the meantime I’ve been experiencing some fantastic highs followed by discomfiting lows—my mom read somewhere that in terms of stress, moving ranks right up there with a death in the family, and this is the first move where I’ve started to believe the assertion. I think I’ll feel a lot better at this time two weeks from now.

There are a lot of things I’m going to miss. Some of them really are just things—the mountains, campus (which has practically been my home for most of the last seven years), Macey’s, all my running routes. But mostly it’s the people I will miss, and that’s the hardest part because it’s inevitable and because I can never really go back to how things are right now.

There are several types of people I’m leaving behind. I was talking with my roommate about this last night, because it’s interesting for me to contemplate the change and my feelings about the change. Interestingly, the people who mean the most to me are the easiest to leave behind. This sounds strange, but it made sense once I thought about it. There’s my family, first. My sister and brother, my grandma, and even my cousins who I only see a few times a year—I love being around all of them, and I will miss them terribly (especially my brother and sister here in Provo). But at the same time, I know that even though I am leaving they will still be there, at the other end of the phone line. I will still see them, they will still be my friends and my family, and our relationships will not grow weaker for the distance. More than anything, just knowing that my family is still there, my relationship with them more or less unchanged, makes any major transition that much easier, and I’m grateful to be close enough to my own family that I can have that long-distance support wherever I go.

Then there are my established friendships, the friends who stick around almost like family. They’re not quite up there with family, but have been such an important part of my life that they’re close. I’m going to miss them, too, but I know we’re not going to lose contact. I have no doubt that I will see them again. I know I have places to stay in Utah, Virginia, Chicago, New York, California, and that I have people I can call or email when things get hard, people who will be happy to hear from me and who will also be willing to call me. Most friends do not become established like this, but enough do that I feel I am part of a solid support network that is not going to change even as our lives and circumstances do.

Surprisingly (to me) the hardest to leave behind are the people who never quite became close friends. This includes people with whom I think I might have been able to become better friends had I either taken more time, or had more time in the first place. It also includes people who probably would never be my best friends, no matter how much time I were to spend with them, but are still people I like and admire and enjoy being around. All of these people will most likely fade from my life, and this makes me sad because I know that’s how things are. It’s how things have to be. I can’t possibly keep in contact with every person I meet and like—that’s an awful lot of people. But it still makes me sad that it has to be that way, because they have all meant something to me in some way at some time.

At times like these I think of what I ought to have done differently. I can think of so many things I could and should work on if I were around longer, and now I’m out of time. I mentioned this to my married friend and she said, casually, “Well, now you get a fresh start in Michigan and you can work on all those things there.” But somehow that doesn’t feel quite right. I mean, I am looking forward to a fresh start, to setting at least a few things right and to having the chance to work on becoming the person I want to be without some of the baggage of who I’ve been. But at the same time, it almost feels like running away from challenge and responsibility. I know this is not a valid feeling—if anything, I’m running away to greater challenges and responsibilities. But I don’t like feeling like I’ve left things undone.

I suppose, though, that life is just like that. Things don’t come wrapped in nice little packages, challenges don’t ever really have an end, people come and go. It’s not such a bad thing. The friends who stay are that much sweeter because of the friends who move on. Right now I’m scared of what’s ahead and sad for what I’m leaving behind, but it’s nice to know that this is just temporary, to realize, as a friend wisely told me yesterday over lunch, that sometimes you just have to go through the painful stages to get to where you need to go. I forget that sometimes, get caught up in the fact that things aren't perfect at the moment and that I'm stuck in transition. But the transitions are necessary and transitory - and there's certainly a lot to enjoy at the moment. I have people to see and things to do and books to read and plans to make, and then I will move on to new goals, new challenges, new people, new ways of thinking and acting. It should be exciting.

So. It's decided. I am stressed but I am happy. And from this point on I am going to stop mourning what has not yet passed and start looking forward to what's to come.