I calculated it out: I have ten nights left to sleep in this bed. In less than two weeks, I board a plane bound for Boston; I'm leaving London behind me.

I'm not ready yet.

It's been one of those nights where having fun was almost detrimental to my happiness, because I can't stop thinking about the fact that it's not going to last much longer and in a few short weeks, I'll be wishing I were here. (This is screwed up logic, I realize, which is why I say "almost detrimental." It's still better for my happiness to have fun than to sulk without any.)

I'll let you in on a little secret you'd have never guessed: I think about things way too much, especially after they've already happened and are now artifacts of the past instead of present-day parts of my life. Everybody probably does this, but I think I do it to an unhealthy extent and a lot more than other, much more normal people probably ever do. Sometimes, the amount I miss something is proportional to the amount I enjoyed it; a lot of times, I multiply it a couple times over and miss it that much more.

I don't mean "miss" in some overly melancholic fashion where I spend days just pining over days gone by—but "miss" in that I think about things, get routinely nostalgic, play lots of music that remind me of it and mentally reply moments I can remember over and over trying to remember everything because I know I won't. I hate that a couple years from now, I'll really have a hard time remembering all of this. It's like how you might have a roll of film documenting a trip, and you've looked at those photos enough that you at least remember all the places you've got a picture of, but then, maybe a long time later, you look through the photos your friend took on that same trip and they're from slightly different angles, of somewhat different things and with different faces in them. And suddenly, you realize whole chunks of memory have been completely erased, or at least, stored so far back in your brain you need a sensory trigger to recall them. Or maybe you can't recall them at all.

Anyway. I count how long it's been since whatever it was ended, and mentally, I calculate dates in the future by how long it's been since things were over. (For example, from now until I turn twenty one is as long as it's been since I finished up my internship. This is actually sort of a positive one, because I am looking forward to being 21, and it does not seem like all that long ago that I was busy ferrying photocopies around the office. Then again, 21 somehow loses its importance living here, and rushing toward 21 means rushing away from the present.)

I'm also having one of those slightly-panicked moments, where I don't particularly want to grow up. The end of last semester brought on an unprecedented rush of I-don't-wanna-graduate-EVER feelings which subsided a great deal this semester (living with a bunch of freshmen who are as far away from graduation as college gets probably helped that no small amount). But now those feelings are starting to come back a bit. I have three semesters of college left. Just three.

I don't know what I'll do, where I'll go and what'll become of me and frankly, I don't give a damn. At least not now, 'cause I really, really don't want to think about it, because I want it to be so far off that it's not worth thinking about. And I know that's not really how it is—

It's almost time to go; and some very small part of me is almost happy to mark another address off the long string of temporary living places I've had in the last eight months because I know that's one step closer to finding some kind of stability (at least in terms of address) and maybe in a few years, I won't move an average of once every six weeks, and I think, by the time that time comes, I'll probably be ready for it.