It turns out that the prospect of moving, of packing up my Ottawa life and moving up, up and away, is scarier that I originally thought. As a rule, moving away to support fiancé fulfill his dream is nothing to complain about, and I embrace his future with wide open arms (knowing he’s there to fill the other half of the embrace). We will go to a place far away, together, and we will have a house and we will get our groceries in a new store. This is exciting, like travel, only for longer than a week. I will still have phones and TV and a computer and mail to connect me to my family and friends back home. But they will be back home.

I know that if I was unattached to someone in a way I am to fiancé, I would travel, take internships in far away places, and get out exploring the big wide world on my own, and that is exciting and definitely more scary. I am glad that we will be doing this together. “If you can choose one person to be in a foxhole with, you wanna make sure it’s a good person.” Well, he’ll be my foxhole partner. We’ll buy the things that will decorate our home and meet the people we’ll socialize with on weekends. We’ll pick out new favorite restaurants and new things to spend our money on. We’ll do all those things we put off in our minds until that intangible time when we grow up. Yeah, come next summer, we will grow up.

It must be something in the autumn air, something in the blowing leaves that makes everyone lament the cold and anticipate the future seasons of warmth. With than anticipation comes more thoughts lingering towards what we will all (as near graduates) actually do next summer. We won’t save up for school, we won’t have a four-month break. We have to grow up. And with these types of thoughts dancing around, preoccupying all of our brains, I can’t help but bite my nails a little bit that the inevitable is soon going to be the present. I will grow up and move on.

No one likes leaving the warmth of their blanket in the morning when they are assaulted by the awakening noise of their alarm clock, called to get out and shuffle into the world. But we know we have to. How do people go about making these kinds of calls? How did today’s grownups make their transition from teat-sucker to grownup?