What is worse? Finding out that you were not attached as you
thought you were, or finding out that the things which have tied you down to
that place had no real meaning in your life in the first place? Well, you spent
enough of your salary on all this stuff, Van!
It was
both freeing and heartbreaking as she sorted through her “stuff” and was the
worst is that she was done sorting most of it before she left for work at 8:30
am. It took her all of 3 hours to categorize, classify and decide what, where
and how she would dispose with most of it. When she got to work the thought hit
her as she stood in the elevator waiting that she should probably give notice.
She had
the Beetle Bailey impression of the rake thwacking her in the face that this
might be a little more complicated than what she had originally imagined.
Standing
in her living room amid the packing boxes trying to decide what to do with the
4 IKEA lamps all the while wondering if shear madness had overcome her senses,
it probably was. Where did she think she was going? Another country or another
planet, whether was or wasn’t the lamps had to go along with some of the
furniture. The car had proven the easiest to sell, especially since she had
sold it at cost. She had ended up subletting the condo, since selling it
outright had proven to involve more of a commitment in time than she felt she
had left.
Vanessa
couldn’t shake the feeling that there was only a small window before the
opportunity to go home would be removed and she would be stuck here on earth
for a long time to come. It was a feeling like one got when the scientists and
astrologers started talking about planets aligning. Were there signs seen and
unseen unfolding around her? Probably not but the feeling of foreboding
remained with her from the time she left her parents. She could no more shake
it than she could the determination that she would be going wherever Quest
would lead her no matter how crazy it sounded.
She had
not seen him since that day in her office. He had called her the morning after
she came home from her parents and left a voicemail on her home phone. She had
played it and replayed it over and over again. It took her a good 15 minutes before she had gotten all the
references and even now more occurred to her as she stood in between the moving
boxes.
“Leavin’
on a airplane, don’t know when I will be back again. All your bags are packed
and you are ready to go, I will be standing outside your door when you are
ready to go. Woke you up to say goodbye, you may hate to go, but every place
you go I will think of you, Every song I sing I will sing for you, was this
cryptic? Yep it was but when you are ready to go I will be outside your door.”
It had
taken her three used record stores and twenty buck to get the clerk to record
the LP onto cassette tape to get a playable copy of that damned song. Peter,
Paul and Mary not John Denver informed her of their intentions to leave on a
jet plane and throw the context of the message into complete disarray. She felt
like screaming at him but when she tried to redial the number called in on she
got a subway pay phone in Hong Kong. It was very creepy and what were the odds
that the girl who answered the phone knew reasonable English?
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