Last Nights

Last nights have always been difficult. One tends to get caught up in the details of departure, and within those details are layers of doubt and lingering regret--over the undone or underdone, over the potential for intrinsic change, and for the vanishing moments of the now in the stark awareness that the present becomes past in the instant it happens. Being here has been everything and nothing I'd anticipated. The anxieties were mostly unfounded, and the experience overwhelmingly positive. Friendships were forged and realizations discovered. To an extent, I feel younger--as if some sort of vital essence were recaptured and, to my great surprise, reinvigorates me. I'm infused. And now, because it's a last night of this, a genus of freedom that I've lived through the last few weeks, I fear its imminent pastness, the moment at which this becomes that thing that once was; and puzzle at the fact that the life I left behind is again my future. More characters will be typed, but only after departure.