it's been a while

Ok, it's been a long time since I posted anything but I'm having one of those moments. I'm sitting in my apartment for the last time. Tomorrow I move into a new apartment with my boyfriend. Well, I move in tomorrow, he moves in in about two weeks. So I'm sitting in my apartment for the last time. the thing that I've been thinking about, not just now, but for the last month or so since we signed the lease, is that, if this works out (with the boyfriend) then this is the last time I will ever live alone. EVER. I love living alone. I also love my boyfriend. I'm ready to take the next step with him. There's just something about that idea of leaving behind a stage of your life. It feels exactly like the last night at home before I went off to college. The night before I left for college I hung out with my then-best-friend Imogene. We went to the movies and went out to dinner and smoked cigarettes in her car and didn't talk about what was happening the next day. We tried to be in the moment, just being ourselves, who we were at that moment and who we would never be again - high school friends who lived in our parents homes, by our parents rules. We were girls. We didn't know what it was like to pay our own rent. We didn't know what it was like to find work that would support us and to get paychecks made out to us and to be worried about being laid off. And we knew, sitting in my car, smoking our Camel lights and debating about how many calories the nicotine would help us burn, that this part of our life was over. We were leaving behind adolescence.

So what am I leaving behind right now? This post-college, I have a job that I sort of like now, friends who I've built a family of sorts with, a city that I love and hate. Nothing is really changing. But it is. Something big is changing. I'm leaving something behind but I'm also entering something new and big. Maybe that's scarier than leaving something behind. Maybe it's easier to be nostalgic about what you're leaving than to really understand what you're getting into.