50% Anticipation

Tickets are booked. I’m going home.

I’m leaving at the beginning of December and Sparky joins me a couple of weeks later. My sister will still be in school until right before Christmas. My brother and father work (obviously).

Do you know what this means? It means an open schedule. It means that I am a free woman. It means no familial obligations. It means I decide what I want to do from a purely egocentric perspective. It means lunch with my old friends; it means afternoons at the gun range, it means shopping. It means I get to have conversations with the woman I was before I left.

As most of us Expats know, trips home are often jam-packed with things you have to do, things you want to do, people you have to see and people you want to see. Most of the time, I’m so busy that I don’t get to sit back, relax and enjoy. Add Christmas and life becomes so busy that I need a vacation after our vacation.

Not this time. This time I have two weeks free in my favorite city in the world. I have free time to do all those things. I can follow my own schedule without having to cajole and harass others into following it too. I no longer have to wait on anyone. I can just Go, Gadget, Go!

I fell asleep last night dreaming of all that I’m going to do. There are categories: Personal Pampering, Shopping, Friends, Time with Dad, Time with Jeffy.

The last time I had some alone time with my GBF was last year for two hours at a coffee shop down the street from where I was staying. I want more time or at least more occasions. I miss him.

I want a day of beauty. I want a leg/bikini wax. I want a mud bath and massage. I want my hair done without conversation by someone who won’t leave me with Midwestern hair.

I want the ease of communication my brother and I have, the non-stop laughter and the sibling companionship. I maintain that no one, no parent, no spouse, no lover, no friend knows you as well as a sibling and if you’re lucky there is nothing like the friendship you can have with a sibling.

I want to go see a movie alone and leave before the credits are over because I really don’t care if there’s an Easter egg at the end.

I want that silence that comes with being alone and very, very comfortable in your own skin; the silence that you don’t have to explain and the 1,000-mile stares that aren’t interrupted.

I think this might be my last chance. I have plans for next year that will make this my last hurrah, so to speak. The last time I can ever really be that unencumbered again. And I guess I have to figure out in these two weeks if I’m okay with that.

Before I moved here, I was rather independent. Since moving here I am less so. It’s a complicated turn of events that I think some of you understand. I hope so because I have no words to explain.

I can only try to understand it. You move and marry, change your name and the price you pay comes from a place you never knew was vulnerable. A place, a space you thought was safe, so integral that you couldn’t possibly part with it. You’d gladly pay from other resources, but that’s not how it works. I guess if it didn’t hurt, it wouldn’t be worth it? After the deal is done, you hope and pray that it was worth the price. Or you think everything is copasetic and then one day you realize the illusion you thought was reality has faded and you are left with a reality you had no idea you were purchasing.

So to that effect, I have to weeks to re-charge. And boy, let me tell you, its coming just in time.