shar meets world

Top three questions I have been getting in the past month:

1. "When are you leaving?"
2. "Do you think you will marry a Spaniard?"
3. "Are you getting excited?"

Number 1 is easy (May 25th). Number 2 is easy to evade ("Not unless he's tall"). Number 3 has, up until this point, been slightly awkward. Because I've been at the point where I should be saying yes, but most of what I've felt has been a mix of trepidation, stress, and fear, and all manner of other things that are rather unlike excitement.

This whole process of getting to Spain has felt a bit like a kindergartner talking about her wedding day: sure, it'll be great when it gets here, but there are about twenty years to go. So when I am asked if I'm excited, I think of myself as that little girl, cutting and pasting magazine pictures in her journal, storing up ideas for someday far away.

Until this week, in which my emotions have finally caught up with my brain in recognizing that, oh my goodness, this is it! In a week, I will be living in a new country! And now that I get it, that I really and truly see it coming true, that I'm actually putting on the gown to walk down the aisle (or, perhaps, slipping into the comfy pants for my 8-hour flight), I am not just excited. I am downright ecstatic. So this is what it feels like to do the thing you're supposed to be doing! This is what it feels like to breathe again, to anticipate. This is the part that makes all that other stuff worth it--all those impossible papers that make you cry, that make you want to hole up on your couch and never even talk about moving again, the moments where it all feels so overwhelming that you'd rather puncture a whole dream than pull yourself out of your comfortably complacent existence.

It is finally feeling like spring here--my favorite season. It's the part of the year when the lull of winter is shed like an old skin. I step out of the self I've been, out of that long hibernation in a cave of apathy. The sunshine is beaming in, waiting for me to drink it like water, and I feel so awake. So ready.

Yes, yes, I am excited.