In an instant I shall blink again...

If you ever need proof that every person has the potential to lead hundreds, if not thousands of lives, other than the lives they're currently living--take a leave of absence.

Maybe it's a little different for me since I have no kids, no pets, no spouse (Tim can still say "Yes, please" or "No, Thanks" to any shenanigans I get into), no investments, all of my stuff can be sold or given away in a moments notice. Hell, my only valid form of ID is a passport. Still, I think even for someone with some or all of those things it might be easier than it seems to have a totally new life.

I've been thinking a lot about this in the past week. The most obvious reason is that I'm not in my DC life right now. Time has suddenly slowed down again. Days are passing like they used to pass, before I was so stressed out and every day was completely the same seemingly down to the minute. In DC, four weeks pass before I can catch my breath, suddenly a month is over and I haven't bought groceries, spoken to my friends, finished half the things I wanted to do... and suddenly another month has passed. Maybe this is just what it means to grow up but I doubt it.

There's a poem by Pete Winslow that begins:

I blink and half my life is over
Yet I am still making plans
In an instant I shall blink again
My eyes are half closed already

It's a sad and terrifying poem about what I don't want my life to be. Even if I love (or perhaps like is better word) my job and what I do, I hate the way it feels to blink and feel as though I've missed it, whatever it is.

I've been in Arkansas just under a week and I feel like I've been here forever. It takes me a solid minute to remember what day it is. I had completely forgotten what luxury feels like. It's not that I'm not working, I'm working on all of my graduate school applications which is soooo nice in a moderately frustrating but invigorating sort of way. It's another way of looking in the scrying mirror at the potential lives that are out there. Right now I'm looking at Georgetown, Tulane, Purdue, CU, and University of Washington, which--as Tim points out--covers all four U.S. time zones. Frankly, I don't know where I want to be. Only that I want to study English. And soon.

In a perfect world, I'd be able to go to graduate school close to all of my friends and family, but since my friends and family live all over the freakin' place if and where I get in to school will decide whom I'm close to, I guess. Having this time off has made it possible for me to reconnect with people I don't talk to much, or see EVER, and I don't want it to end. It's all very mushy and touchy-feely.

Which is pretty much exactly how I want my life to be. No matter which one of the hundreds of thousands of possible lives actually ends up happening, I want there to be lots of trees and deep breaths, friends and family, novels and reasonable grammatical correctness, and long, numerous days.