alisonlauscott

Oh dear.

I was going to start this “dear something”, or something, but there’s nobody to write it to. Seeing as “oh dear” is a favorite saying (both in geriatric tendency and the necessary whimsical intonation), it fits.

I like to say I’ve spent nearly five years here, but with sixteen months in summers, another six a la Française, and four and change in miscellaneous holidays, I guess it’s only been 2.83. In that case maybe I’m making mountain lions out of kittens. Granted, mountain lion kittens by and large turn into mountain lions. I think that’s a fact. So it depends on the kind of kittens we’re talking about.

The last few times I’ve left somewhere it’s been to leave something behind. This time is because I can’t bear not to go somewhere else. I’m not really sure if that changes what kind of kittens they are.

Regardless of species, it may make it much easier to arrive somewhere new (which will warmly welcomed) when you desperately want to be there, but it makes leaving a place you were maybe a little bit fond of a little more difficult.

When I think about it I wasn’t really a huge fan of undergrad. I hardly remember first year in the varsity whirlwind, and I hated second year so much that I moved to France, which says something because do the French ever NOT take kindly to having foreigners dropped into their boulangeries. Fourth year was an academic success but an emotional rollercoaster. But I guess that’s what I needed to realize that having nothing to cry about is something to smile about..and that having something to smile about is nothing to cry about! (Yes, that is blatant question begging, but it’s for literary effect not a rational argument, so I’m not going to get my knickers in a twist over it)

This year’s disappeared before I was able to think of what it was. Unfortunately it probably when I found some things that I didn’t just want to throw out with the baby and the bathwater (in my opinion they can both go). If I’d just finished in four years, maybe I could have left this place angry like the rest of them and I wouldn’t be compelled to do things like write about it. Pessimism is just such a fine choice if you have the option. The aftertaste is bitter but doesn’t last as long.

In what will seem like no time at all, I will have forgotten that any of this was anything to write (home) about. Most likely, it will be a place I vaguely refer to as “near Toronto” when people ask where I did my undergrad. However, I hope where I am going people aren’t going to ask where I did my undergrad. It took going through undergrad to realize that things like undergrad, regardless of where you did them, don’t really matter. In that case, it might only cross my mind when I think of my fabulous first apartment, where the roof leaks, the heater breaks, there are bats in ceiling and the door jams don’t line up…

I assume that by the close of the year I’ll wonder why I ever cared about leaving here, but that doesn’t change that right at this instant I don’t want to not have this place around the corner. I know that to here, my insignificance is not just a possibility but a fact. Unfortunately that makes this moment now all the less palatable.

My life is about to get bigger, but before it does it’s going to get momentarily smaller. It’s that fleeting moment that I am living in and dread. Of course, the possibility of a bigger world is worth this moment, but it doesn’t make this temporary world any less uncomfortable. I am shedding my first solo home, the place where I discovered libertarianism, virtue ethics, and the true value of Tim Hortons and the company of housecats. The rational me that I have tried to hone here tells me that physical and emotional nostaligia are no more a part of you than the clothes you wear, seeing as it’s not as though I will leave my libertarian/virtue ethicist/timbit-loving/cat lady tendencies behind. Seeing as these important things will come with me regardless, the nostalgia feels next to useless, even a hindrance.

Unfortunately my rationality can’t quell the sucker.

The feelings will wane, but until then, in this grimacing lingering moment, I don’t wish that I could stay, but that I could bring so much more of here with me than I will when I go.