I leave in a week! I thought when I woke up this morning.

This deciding to leave New York, or try to, at least, has made my emotions feel like they’re tumbling around in a dryer.

I have one foot in both places, but no grounding anywhere. (Arguably, it’s been a long time since I felt grounded anyway.) I scroll through calendar event after calendar event on my watch, my calendar packed to the gills.

As I squeeze in “one last time” hangouts, I remember why I’m friends with the people I am; I wonder why I’m leaving them.

After September 2, I won’t regularly get the mail sent to my NYC address; I have no forwarding address yet.

My friends and I discuss events and plans; I don’t know if I’ll be here or there.

After years of having the rug pulled out from under me any time I thought I had my footing, I want to know how this ends. As much as I know this, too, is part of the process.

As I climbed the subway stairs, sweating, en route to my going away party, grief smacked me in the chest. This is the first major decision I’m making that I can’t call my mom to talk to her about.

But this decision also takes me to a place where I don’t have to see those painful triggers: the hospital where she was treated, the PATH station I became intimately acquainted with going to visit her, the corner outside Penn Station I stood at crying, waiting for a friend to pick me up after she died.

Instead, I’m going to a place where things are a little slower, a little warmer. My soul craves that gentleness. This has been the most excited I’ve been about the possibility of anything since she died.

California, here I come.  (with a new swimsuit I’m obsessed with to boot!)