Today, I folded up my sewing table, and then lugged my lovely borrowed Bernina back to its original owner. Suddenly my apartment feels like someone else's place and no longer my home.
My life in the last few weeks has consisted of inventories and decisions about what things I want to keep and which I will leave here. I'm living more or less out of a suitcase. On Monday, they come to take anything not in the suitcases away, and put them on a boat. I may not see them again until just before Christmas. (6-12 weeks? Really?)
I have a general level of anxiety that is simply astronomical. This is far beyond my usual travel anxiety. I am trying to quell it by smothering myself in friends and last-minute research.
I'm missing Folsom. I'm missing Much Ado. California is burning. The economy is wobbly and it's freaking people out. I'm going to Houston to a huge women in engineering conference where I hope to talk to a bunch of awesome potential employers.
I'm also going to be giving another talk at Odd Salon, and possibly be teaching at Dickens. And I feel like I ought to be looking at grad schools rather than startups, or starting my own company or something.
And at the same time I'm looking out the window of this spacious, airy flat with its view of the spire of the V&A like a pinprick on the horizon, and I'm watching the clouds roll ever onwards with their particularly English alacrity and I am both homesick for California and already sadly nostalgic about leaving this place.
I think it comes down to this: I have lots of things waiting for me when I get back. But there's so little sense of place, of community. Six months of not really talking to anyone has not helped this - I now feel disconnected from the tenuous connections I had - and now I feel like I need to start over. A new living space, a new job, a new... something? Direction in life? Who knows.
Six to 12 weeks, really?
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