Final prep stretch

This post comes to you from the floor of my empty apartment, where I have retreated alone in a bizarre attempt to avoid pushing away my family. Unfortunately, it does not come to you sponsored by British Airways or Google or Pepsi, or anything else that might enable me to meet my needs once the last step is finally taken.

But about retreating. In what I cannot fail to recognize as part of a pattern, I have spent the last 48 hours being unremittingly awful to my family. That's bad enough, but when you consider that they have helped me to move all of my furniture, clean the entire apartment, driven me all across town as I try to run errands and generally talked me down from the various cliffs I encounter throughout each day as a part of this process... I think there may be a special place in hell for people who spit in their collective relations' eyes the way that I have.

Still, this is how I cope with goodbyes. It's a cliche, but like all cliches that wouldn't exist if they weren't at least partially true, pushing people away is really the easiest way to make sure it doesn't hurt like the dickens to actually be apart from them. With my family, this takes the form of unjustifiable  aggression and sarcastic comments; I've chosen to simply ignore my friends, or to keep my interactions with them as shallow as possible, gradually stretching the fabric of friendship until the form is lost.

I know that this is what I am doing because it's exactly what I did the last time I moved away for school. You would think that if I found this process painful enough to justify a friendship holocaust, that I would not have willingly chosen to repeat the traumatic event. In that case, being a glutton for punishment doesn't really live up to the reality of the situation.

And yet what everyone unfailingly and unceasingly tells me is that this is a wonderful opportunity and that I will have an amazing time. And that they are excited for me, even after I have spent the evening making passive aggressive comments designed to drive them away from me. I have good friends, but they are not making this easier for me.

What should make this easier is the fact that my visa came! There it was, tucked under the doormat when I came to the old place to hide from my family. I don't even know how it's possible, but I have the same smug expression on my face in EVERY SINGLE official government photo I have ever taken. It's uncanny. 

Smug.

Still, now I can officially enter another country (well, Great Britain), even if the person checking my passport develops an immediate dislike of me.

I'm not sure what to do now. I'm supposed to buy a new laptop, which should be exciting because it would be nice to be able to watch videos with something more than, like, daguerreotype-level quality, but the whole prospect just makes me extremely nervous. I think I'm convinced that some sort of electronic snake-oil salesman is going to take me for a ride and I'll end up with two rocks that I've been instructed to rub together in order to boot up. And so there I'll be, rubbing my rocks together in Scotland while all the sheep look at me with superior expressions on their faces, making them dead-ringers for my passport photos.

Realistically, I know that things do not happen this way. But sometimes it is difficult to convince myself that the worst is not necessarily going to occur.