these are not the words i want to use

Four days.

Here I am again, awake entirely too late. It's partially my fault for taking a shower at midnight, but oh well. I don't know that I could have slept anyway, even without the excuse of drying my hair to keep me up.

You see, I am excited. I am also scared. And many other things besides... a walking, bubbling morass of conflicted human experience.

I'm finally doing something I've dreamed of ever since I was a little girl. I'm leaving a place that has held such pain for me, so many long years of suffering and vulnerability. I am traveling, leaving behind my country in pursuit of the new and other. I am getting out there, forging into a (hopefully brighter) future.

But I am also someone of deep care and attachments, someone of deep responsibility. I worry about leaving my brothers behind, my mother, my father, and David. I tell myself that I can't always organize my life around being close to them, but it's hard for feeling to follow logic.

And then, of course, as I am also a creature of organization and routine, I'm stressing about adapting to a new culture and its routines. Naturally.

I know it'll be okay if I just keep taking things day by day. Yet everything here now has a note of finality to it. The more everything around me coalesces into the form they'll take once I'm gone (like my room, so clean and everything packed away), the more I realize how many things I will miss. The more I realize that an era of my life is truly coming to an end and these days will never come again.

I am afraid of change, yet I embrace it. A phoenix: I wish to have no other choice.