On the road, almost

So I was going to write a post about the anticipatory nostalgia you feel when you're about to leave a place; everything starts to look especially beautiful or poignant, the hot dogs begin to have a certain appeal, and you almost think about going to a baseball game, just for the hell of it. I've been walking around my neighborhood and thinking about how much I'll miss my Saturday pilgrimage to Intelligentsia for coffee and Reckless to browse the new arrivals. And the farmers' market in the playground of the nearby school, and the cashiers at Treasure Island, my local grocery store. Even though it doesn't have signs that list the contents of the aisles, and even though I wouldn't buy meat there in a thousand years, it's where I shop. I've even been feeling occasional surges of fondness (a clear sign that my emotions are at a high pitch right now) for all of the perfectly tan joggers who pass me on the lakeshore path. Who's going to motivate me to run faster in England? Kevin Spacey might be in Regents Park, and he might make me run faster, but he isn't there to jog...

But in amidst the bloom of nostalgia and fondness, things have gone a bit -- as the British might say -- tits up. There's some sort of major difficulty getting my visa letter, I can't find anyone to take my apartment, Facebook keeps suggesting that I might want to friend an ex (I think I already tried that, Facebook, but thanks), and I can't find my favorite sandals. Waah, right? I agree that I should get over myself. And that's what I'm trying to do, with the assistance of the occasional ice cream cone and dose of loud music.

Back to moving and how it feels: it's a pleasantly predictable blend of happy and sad, sort of a pre-fab mixture not unlike the sensation a romantic comedy aims to deliver (though, mind you, I don't see my move to London as part of a romantic comedy). Perhaps a comedy, definitely a romance, but not a rom com. But the compressed emotion of being about to leave a place takes everything that place was and wasn't -- everything it lived up to and fell short of -- and compresses the combination of hope and actuality in which actuality calibrates hope into a heady moment of being about to go. You're about to plunge forth into the not-yet-determined Future, but the bills aren't in the mailbox, the roof isn't leaking, you haven't had trouble finding a clothes dryer, and you haven't become inured to the lack of good coffee in London yet. It's the moment where you just get to inhabit the hope (combined, in my case, with some fear of being sent home if I don't get a visa). It's what travel produces in miniature, and it's part of what makes travel so heady, I think. I'll miss Chicago and all of the people and things that make it dear to me, of course, but I'm ready to go, and I'm excited to be going.