i really don't want to go. i'm not sure exactly why, but i want to hang around here and see what my life would be like in a normal, condition-free setting. one where i don't have any external schemata to fill in most of the blanks. one where i don't have any excuses for anything. i have this premonition (which i'm discarding, naturally) that something very important is going to happen when i'm gone. something that i'd really want to be here for. i can't think of anything that would fit into this category, but it doesn't seem like the right thing to do fatewise.
a month isn't that long, but it's long enough for me to not be quite sure who anyone is anymore when i get back. it's probably about the breaking point for that; if you're gone for a week, you can assume that people are roughly the same when you get back, or at least you can assume that if things have changed they're fresh in the relevant people's minds to tell you. but a month? what if something drastic happens in three days? by the time i get back four weeks have gone by since it happened. no one will think to tell me, and i'll be in the dark forever. i'll be missing something. i won't be able to exchange knowing smiles.
i've been gone for longer from ongoing situations, of course. summers at college and high school; at least now i have the luxury of a good month and a half between when i get back until school starts again to figure out what this abstract life of mine would be. of course, that's not that long; the same length as high school summer programs, during which you spend the first three weeks making friends and the last three weeks agonizing over the impending breakup with those friends. in principle, anyway.
last year when i set out on my road trip i had very good feelings, and they came true. i spent three wonderful days hanging out with shalla in san antonio. i dealt with some huge mental things whose magnitude i hadn't even comprehended. i chilled. but this will be different; i'll have social pressure everywhere except the driving, really, and the driving is faster than before. driving from vancouver to duluth in two days minus about five hours (for events), for instance, will be dicey.
so it's an absence without being a vacation. it doesn't really fit. i wish i could stay -- there are so many people i want to get to know better (not so many, really, but three or four.) i want to hang out on beaches here and stay up with the sun until ten and drive through the fog and take day trips and appreciate california. who knows, maybe it'll be here when i get back, but maybe i won't, in the same state, or maybe californian summer will be old hat to everyone by then. i can't shake the feeling that this trip is an unfortunate occurrence.
i'm sure i'll enjoy the trip itself, but i can't help but wonder what might have been.
on an unrelated note, i'm starting to worry -- as i mentioned to jeremy the other day -- that people are starting to like my weblog more than they like me. let's call my readership 20, which is a close approximation; this means that there are more people with whom i communicate primarily through my weblog than there are people with whom i communicate primarily through personal interaction, since there aren't 10 people who i talk to more than i talk to my weblog. it's dicey. i need to keep this thing me, and of course i have the sinful kind of pride about it, but i don't want it to outstrip the real me.
i saw a two-minute play once entitled "the idea of you." it was a monologue, really, where a guy was recounting a phone call with his girlfriend. quite funny. the basic idea was that they had fallen in love with the idea of each other, not the actuality. it's hard to live up to the idea of you, and it's much easier to get that idea -- you in top form, so to speak -- when what you see is only words and not the person. because you can make the words whatever you want, because there's nothing between the lines.
if i weren't going away, i'd throw in an ardent appeal to my californian readers -- though i have no idea how many of you are actually from this area, maybe no marginal ones beyond those i see in person -- to meet the real me. i bet no one would take me up on it -- it takes a lot of courage -- but it's moot anyway. i may as well cast the net for the sparser school of fish: if you're going to be basically anywhere in the northwest for the next couple of weeks or so, let me know.