Some things can't be folded into the corner of the suitcase

Things are compacting, like a star just before it goes nova. Time, possessions, relationships. They press together tightly, overlapping, and rubbing, presaging either an explosion or a descent into dense nothingness.

Three weeks until I leave Houston, my home for the last four years. Three weeks, down from the six months I had when I first found out about the Austrian Adventure. Twenty-one days of summer left, instead of ninety. Three weeks to make my life fit into two smallish SUVs instead of a 500-square-foot apartment, a corner desk, and the Tracker.

My stuff seems to be crawling out of closests and corners, stretching slightly before settling into a crabby pile that says, "You've neglected me for a year, so I'm going to make this entire room smell musty." I'm slowly erasing my presence in my apartment, working from the back to the front. The living room looks like a rat's nest (enlarged to show detail, as they say), and the back bedroom is little more than a desert of beige carpet. Two SUVs: that's maybe 10 boxes, one of which is the cat carrier. The books have to stay, all 300 of them. Most of the kitchen. All of the furniture, obviously. And then from two SUVs, I have to get it down to a suitcase and a duffel bag. My life, travel sized. Doesn't work quite as well as miniature shampoo.

The relationships are the hardest to compact. How do you fit a friend into three lines in an address book, a confidant into a few words on a postcard? The last time I went abroad, it wasn't such a problem—I knew I was going to be gone less than six months, and that everybody would be there when I came back. As if all of Houston slept, waiting for me to come back and kiss it awake. This time, Sleeping Beauty's not even going to be around when I get back. The city will be there, but almost everything that made it home—my friends, my school, my apartment, my college self—will be long gone. The vestiges will have to be built into something else entirely. And in the meantime, I watch the idea of a 5,000 mile separation become a separation in its own right, a nasty foreshadow of the real thing that urges me both to let go and to cling.

It's amazing how deliberate the whole process is, when to all outward appearances, there is nothing but chaos taking place. Just like the molecules of that rogue star—more and more excited, wild, and apparently random, but all leading up to a predetermined outcome. Highly contradictory: thrilling and frightning, uncertain and inevitable.

Give me the explosion.