Next Friday Krissa and I are flying to England.
Even in my grammar things have changed, so you might understand why I'm feeling...unusual, to use Withnail's words, about it.
To say, "I am going back to England" feels wrong. It suggests that I have but stayed awhile. The whole sentence smacks of resetting, of touching base and going home before coming back for another long stay.
And it's not like that. I live here now. New York is my home. There is no rule to say that you only have one home, far from it, but New York is the home where I live, if you can extract sense from such an apparently redundant statement.
I was worried about how it would feel to return to Ventnor, after the longest I've ever been away. Would I be able to look around without seeing all of the changes? When knowing a place so well is part of what makes it home, how will it be when time has made it different?
There have been times when I've hated that town for how familiar it was to me.
Now I'm in a situation where I'm worried it will be so different as to feel unlike the place I imagine, or the place I'm expecting.
But I think it'll be like meeting up with an old friend. If you're tense and worried about whether or not you're going to get on like you used to, you probably won't get on like you used to. How much of the time when you were with your old friend were you tense or worried about the relationship?
You have to just go with it - catch up, swap stories. Listen. Relax.
It's just going to be strange having to adapt to things which have been so familiar in the past.
When I moved to the US, I had to consciously change the directions in which I checked for traffic before I crossed a street. And now I'll be doing that in England.
I unthinkingly use American terminology. I go to the bathroom, I stroll along the sidewalk, I take out the trash, I take the subway. My sister is undoubtably going to take the piss out of me for this.
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