I didn’t say anything about it, because for a few days I wanted the news to be mine. The instinct to share every major life event only really reveals its ferocity when you go against it, and I wanted to feel that and let it subside - to actually make the decision to talk about my life a decision, rather than the done thing.
The news is that in exactly one month’s time, assuming everything goes to plan, I’ll be safe in the knowledge that my visa application has been approved, beginning to plan a wedding and sorting out my travel plans for early January. This is all immensely exciting, obviously, but also surreal. You grow used to waiting after a while, and although I have over a month more to wait, I’m starting to see the end.
By March next year, I’ll be married. By May, I’ll be looking for jobs in another country. Maybe by the end of next year, I’ll have a green card. Understand: these are not dates, but they’re the beginning of a solidification that’ll only get more specific as time goes by. The point is that the artificial bottleneck that has been applied to my progression through life thanks to a lengthy immigration process is about to be cleared, and that’s simultaneously freeing and terrifying. But mostly surreal.
Maybe it’s because the journey itself is so straightforward. There are no long, multi-week voyages to endure if you want to end up in the United States; granted, there’s a lot more preamble than there used to be, but once I get on a plane I can fall asleep and wake up on the other side of the world. One long blink, and suddenly everything has changed. There are people I’m gaining - not least my fiancé - who were absent from me before. There are also people I’m losing. I lost some of them last week, when my work contract at a local further education college ended, and the eight people I’d spent a year getting to know left my life forever. But there will also be friends - I’ll presumably keep in contact with those who are closest, but there will be some on the fringes who’ll drift away.
We’ve been through all of that, though. I’m starting to run the risk of repeating myself, having been thinking about this for so long. The main thing at the moment is getting to grips with the reality of it all, but that’s something that’ll likely only start to happen when I actually arrive.
I should truncate this, then: one month until the next milestone. Then we’ll see what happens.