With a little help from my friends...

I try to sort out my thoughts sometime by drawing a picture of my head, and the immediate things coming to mind are written, circled and placed above my head. Then all the little things that connect to them on top of that, and so on.

I've never really shared my thought diagrams, save for once or twice with my Emergency Person, but here's the thing. I started a diagram last night and it started on a sheet of 8.5x11 note paper. Since last night, post-its have been added, things scratched, lines re-drawn, etc. and it is essentially a mess. Surprisingly enough, I seem to be just fine. The list is long and the connections are uncanny, but here's a small picture of where my head, and to a degree of notable interference in rational thought, my heart are at this moment.

1 - I am leaving the country in less than 30 days and I am terrified, excited, and completely overwhelmed. Paperwork takes up my time.

2 - Funds. As my friend Claiborne would say, EGADS it's expensive to fly to the middle east.

3 - The time keeps flying. I turn 30 in June. That means by the time I leave Abu Dhabi I will be 32, maybe 33. My parents will be pushing into retirement age at the worst time in the history of their lives to retire, and I'll probably still be wondering to myself "if I buy these shoes, can I still make the electric bill payment?" Wondering, always, when will be a grown up and have a real savings account and a contingency plan?

4 - #s 1-3 remind me that I am the kind of person who likes to plan everything out. This past holiday vacation was the first time that I didn't have time or energy to put together a file with my destinations, confirmations, potential activities (list of requisite Irish pubs for any city where the Emergency Person and I would visit, etc.). Worse, I couldn't plan for the emptiness that would overcome me when I returned home to Vegas without my puppy.

And that was when it hit me that my life is about to change on a level I hadn't thought of until now. That moment when I opened the door, set down my trusty tote bag chock full of airplane magazines, used boarding passes, my beat-up macbook and likely a few stranded Swedish fish, and I looked around my apartment (which the roomie had cleaned from top to bottom), and realized that this bit of quiet, this bit of loneliness, was just the beginning.

You see, you plan to do things. For example, you are presented with an amazing opportunity to move halfway around the world with the person you love most in it and the only real question you ask yourself at first is: "well, can I change my lifestyle?"

Then you ask, "can I afford this?"

A few questions in (all with positive answers), you think to yourself, "Can I really live that far away from my people for 2 years (at least)?"

Can I?

Al Gore invented the Internet for a reason. And the good people at Skype do a nice job of making communication easy and efficient and cheap. But there is something to be said for hugging your 18 month old nephew after hanging out on the floor with him, eating chips and playing with trucks for a few hours. There is even more to be said for getting in the car, being nearly in tears over some bullshit experience, and calling your mom to vent. Or at least, calling my mom. Or my small circle of female friends that have basically been my life line for 10 years or so.

So when people ask, "what are you going to miss the most?" - while I am tempted to say "all things American"...really I will miss those phone calls. There's email, voicemail, Skype, video chat, Google Talk, etc. But with crazy time zone changes and God knows what kind of insane schedules we've all got - challenging jobs, boyfriends, husbands, babies (yikes!) - it will be hard to call your rock after a shit day and lose it while you're sitting in the parking lot of the gym.

When I was 23, my dear friend and I were drunk at a pre-wedding hotel party, sitting in pajamas with badly mixed martinis leaning against a wall and laughing our asses off at something. I don't remember what was so funny, but I remember us saying, nearly in tandem, "this is why I don't have a boyfriend." For the longest time, that was a kind of mantra for our lives. I think she put it best when she said "why the fuck am I going to change and be boring for the sake of not alienating men?" I think at that point we might as well have cut our fingers and declared our dedication to ourselves.

What's amazing is that, for the most part, we've kept that mantra. We've found, for periods of time, men who aren't as alienated by us as our predictions might have indicated. We've grown up, we've been through losses and successes and moves and changes. We watch shows like Sex and the City together and understand the whole girl power movement.

And frankly, when Carrie Bradshaw is stuck in Paris (with the Russian who slapped her - completely unacceptable) and she's "rescued" etc...once she returns home she's right there with the girls. So the more I think about moving to Abu Dhabi (with the best guy I know, who knows better than to slap a girl from New Jersey), the more I think of those moments when you're most alone and how you need a little help from your friends (call the cliche police, I'm guilty).

It's not when that guy has walked out the door, or when you wake up by yourself. It's when there's no one to call to talk about it.

Here's hoping that the Internet helps me avoid those moments, because the quiet house without the puppy was enough to fill a few pages of paper with thoughts associated with the guilt, abandonment, maternal instincts (and the hot mess those become, etc.) that came to fruition when I realized my four legged kid was not going to greet me at the door anymore. God knows the kind of pickle I'll be in when no one is awake at 2AM EST to discuss the fact that the humidity in Abu Dhabi has ruined my hair and my clothes are being held hostage at the cleaners (much less when something truly horrible happens).