Pre-Travel Anxiety

So the countdown has begun. 17 days from now I'll be on a plane to Mexico. I'm experiencing some disconnection, anxiety, weird intense dreams. I'm about to finish up my last days at this job at the better business bureau, and then I'll be jobless except for my freelancing with the News & Review. I plan on doing freelancing for other publications if I can. But today I was looking back at the stuff I've written for them, and seeing only flaws. Writing for money is different than writing for yourself. A turn of phrase becomes plastic, you force your voice into something that can be built, altered, dismantled, rearranged. The money gives it a mask, a distance. I look at this stuff and some of it is cool, and some of it seems to trite or pretentious or forced. Whatever. Its experience, its getting out there and fucking doing it. But it goes to show my state of mind right now. Obsessively looking through the craigslist.org job listings and fretting over how little there interests me and how little everything pays that I think I could get. Nevermind, I tell myself, you'll find some job, any job, when you get back, no use worrying about it now. I'd be less worried if I were by myself. Now that I'm with Aurora, I don't want to be a burden on her financially. If I was alone I could stay with friends for a little while when I got back and... what, bum around? What are you thinking? No, it isn't that. It's that you've come along this far and now you want to tear everything you've done down. Or its that you're seeing a new chapter opening and you want to close this last one, tuck it in and put it to bed, and you're worried sick that you're gonna go backwards again. Its a zigzagging path to the future, not a linear one. Then you were reading that stuff you wrote, picking at its seams with a hook. It's just a structure that was built, sewn together with verbal thread, its not identity- how can the eye look at itself? Just like this morning, can't shave without the bathroom mirror because it fell down. That made you think about how shaving is an act you do in the mirror. In the morning in the mirror you compose yourself for others. For the others you face in the day, you are arranged, clean-shaven, clean, perfect as straight lines as you can manage. Nature is not clean, not straight, not like you- not a thing made of qualities, but a quality made of things. You're all turned around, having coffee in the morning with that coffee smell thinking of the cathedrallike hum of airports and trainstations, travel about to engulf your entire life, every moment, your routine broken, exhilarating. It's this waiting that gets you. This limbo, this interim. Finishing, tying up of loose ends. It's maddening, kind of.
17 days from now I'll be on a plane to Mexico. Thinking in circles today.