I won't be coming home

    Again and again JoAnne and I have tried to get our heads around this event that's is bearing down on us, my leaving for 27 months. It's daunting. We don't have the bandwidth. She said this morning as we scurried around each other getting breakfast, "I can't imagine your coming home in two years." She meant she couldn't imagine what it would be like, my coming home, arriving, standing here in the kitchen again, going to the bedroom, splitting wood in the yard. Conversations like this spring up out of nowhere (nowhere? isn't that like saying the explosion just came out of nowhere after having assembled the explosives, laid them into the wall and lit the fuse?...and so, apparently much of this experience will be about expanding perspective.)
     "I know," I said. "I can't imagine it either."
      Then, in a flash of insight I said, "I won't be coming home."
      "I won't be here." She said.
      "That's the point of all this," I said. And it is. I--the self writing this, the one just over the mental problems and the one with the habits who believes in a big breakfast and who has chips on his shoulders about so many things, who likes this and doesn't like that, won't be coming home. Or, at least, we hope he won't be. We're both looking forward to me being a different person, keeping the things we like, those aspects of me that work well, having grown out of and left behind those aspects we don't like, that I, especially, don't like, that don't work well, that keep me back from expanding into the world as my truer self. And similar is true for JoAnne. A different JoAnne will be here and a different me will be walking down the driveway in 2 years time, June (or so) 2013. We wonder who those people will be and this is no small source of trepidation.
     Those numbers, that date, doesn't make much sense right now. It, too, is something I will have to grow into. It will come nevertheless just as March 1st is coming at its steady rate. All that will happen but as noted earlier, time is doing some strange things, its tick and tock slurred and unreliable. I can no longer rely on the clock to tell me as much as I thought it did before Christmas, before the blue package landed on my desk and took it up and decided to believe in it.