Shutting the door to my friend Simon’s apartment in Germany was the first time I really felt it. That nervous excitement and exhilaration that’s wrapped up in adventure. This year-long trip around the world that’s been nearly two years in the making just didn’t feel real until then. It didn’t feel real when I informed work about my plans to leave, or when I handed back the keys to my old apartment, or even when I moved nearly everything I owned into storage.
Sure, life was incrementally changing. A month before departure I found myself sleeping on the couch beds of my very gracious friends, but I would still wake up and go to work. And when I stopped going to work the week before leaving, I was still riding the metro past work. I'd cross familiar streets, and stop off at my favorite lunch spots to squeeze in another visit with friends, as I checked off my final to-dos at various government offices. My old life still was within grasp. It felt like I could turn back at any moment and life as I knew it would resume.
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| The Frankfurt skyline from my work's summer party--part of what I'll be leaving behind for a year. |
The weeks leading up to my departure had felt anything but exhilarating actually. As colleagues asked me in eager envy, or perhaps just politeness, when I was heading off and where I was going, all I could muster was the same cookie-cutter reply, “O, I’ll be flying to Budapest at the start of September, and then making my way down to Turkey by train.” I would say those things, but somehow I couldn’t emotionally connect with them. I was not truly excited, or at least not as excited as I thought someone in my position ought to be, and a bit of guilt came with that as well. It actually began to concern me. Maybe I didn't want to leave at all, I worried, but I let myself be carried by the decisions I'd already made. Surely I knew what was best for me!
I was just fine on the surface, but that inner part of my mind was spinning with the stress of trying to tie up the life I'd built in a foreign country over the past eight years into a neat bow--a life, for the record, that I really like!--so that I could unfurl it upon my return. It wasn’t that any one task was extraordinarily demanding. In fact lots of if was pretty mundane, but the sheer coordination of it all and newness left me a little rattled and scatterbrained. So much so that I even unknowingly purchased the incorrect metro ticket to Simon's apartment, which, to my horror and deep embarrassment, the conductors discovered, and for which I must now pay a €60 fine.
But, standing there with my carefully curated backpack strapped snuggly around my hips, doorknob in hand, all those details melted away. A two-inch gap between the edge of Simon’s front door and its frame was all that was left between me and the trip of a lifetime. I just stared at it for a moment, knowing that once sealed that door would cut me off from anything I'd potentially forgotten and everything I was leaving behind. After all, Simon was at work that afternoon, and the keys he'd lent me were now on the table in the hallway. No turning back. I took a few moments to calm the butterflies in my stomach and then decisively tugged the door shut. A moment of personal triumph, of believing in myself, of staring down the doubts and fears in my mind. My to-do list was complete. Now off to see what there is to see!
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