Moving Anxiety

Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez comes so close to capturing the stone which has settled in my stomach as of late:

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

I feel this horrible anxiety about moving away from a place where I am comfortable and happy to somewhere I actually fear I will lose myself. I am feeling increasingly like I have no will of my own to stop it. I am on a precipice and I feel paralyzed by fear; there are hands on my back and I can only move over the edge where they will me to go. And then I wonder if it is just cowardice of change. Some say nostalgia is weak, a denial of the human condition of perpetual change and growth. But is moving home growth? Is it not a regression? I am packing up a life I built on my own and am taking it back to the four walls where I was sent for punishment after temper tantrums, where posters of bands had sat on my ceiling over my bed, where I cried over boys who didn't love me. There is none of the excitement of a new adventure, a new challenge - only an old and stale city who I had been running from before I even knew myself. Am I defined by place and space or time? I am scared, and my stomach is in knots as I pack boxes and throw away things I forgot I had once had such silly enthusiasm for. A holographic card, scented soaps, kind notes on a paper whose depth I forgot I was capable of. 

And time moves on as a I sit, breathless. 

Childlike.

Elegance is not the prerogative of those who have just escaped from adolescence, but of those who have already taken possession of their future.

Coco Chanel