Find it on a Map

I feel a little woozy after spending the better part of two hours at the travel agent with Mustardseed, booking our trip to New Zealand. Light headed after finalizing those life changing flights.

Thank god for Italy and those beautiful bottles of Ripasso. I can travel a less threatening way: just a little snort, darling; barely a bottle, please. Something to calm my nerves.

Better.

So much to wrap my head around. So much to plan. It's very exciting. A few days in Hong Kong for the Lantern Festival, then on to a new home. Committed. I'm committed now, with the physical modicum of money. So small and yet so large.

I leave Canada on the 8th of February, touch Anchorage, then down in that old bastion of the British Empire, stay a few days, and then on to Auckland. I have no idea when I will return. The next step is a flight to Australia, booked for the 20th of October, 2006.

This is not like Paris. I have some money. Not as much as I would like, but then, no one in this blasted society can say that they do. I'm committed. Unequivocally. The apartment has been rented for the 1st of February. I'm packing. I'm arranging.

I'm scared.

Thrillingly so, I suppose. I do feel alive; with it; in every moment and a part of all the decisions I'm making. The driver's seat is completely mine... but it's a big, wide, tiny world out there, and I've been existing in a microcosm for a very long time.

Toronto the Good. You've been my place for a decade. You may well be again, but I have to get out.

My father has promised to take my boys.



Red eye doesn't work on the cats, apparently.

I may miss them most of all. The daily aggravation and companionship of them both. Rue sits on my lap as I write this. He's my writing companion. Pangor is off dealing with the bathtub. He has an issue with the porcelain. Thwup, thwup, thwup. His claws can't get through.

The naming of cats is a difficult matter.

My obsession with Eliot continues.

It isn't just one of your holiday games.

Logos Rue and Pangor Bann.

You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter....

Maybe not a hatter. My mercury intake has been remarkably low, but still, mad.

The cats are the most descriptive examples of my fear. They stay, orphaned but adopted, while I go off exploring. I have a group of friends that will not be abandoned so much as left (self-sufficient all), and though they would never complain or ask me to stay, I have been working to the best of my ability to build not just good friendships this past 10 years, but intrinsic... and I have. It's the hardest thing to leave.

Bringing me back to the city today, my father began speaking to me in a way I am unaccustomed to:

"I was talking to my friend about your plans and he said he wished that he had done that kind of traveling when he was younger. You put stuff like this off, you know? You tell yourself that you can do it later, but (the point is) as long as your situation doesn't change... but change is the one thing you can count on. You should really tell yourself that the one thing you can expect is change, it's gonna happen sooner or later, and it's gonna happen in a way you don't expect. So you have to do it now. There's no guarantee of later."

I think my father is actually proud of me.

Alright, then. Ready.