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I graduate from my master's program tomorrow, and in three days I'll be moving to New York City. My  fingers and body ache as I type this and ignore the packing tape and boxes currently strewn about in the living room. But I'm at a place where I'm really happy anyways, despite the scattered mess of moving my entire life.

That is a strange sentence to type: In three days, I will be moving to New York City. That's essentially been my dream since I was 11, ever since I started watching "Felicity" and "Friends" regularly and daydreamed about cityscapes and sidewalks. Since I chickened out from applying to NYU and Columbia because I couldn't deal with the remote possibility that they -- and by extension, the city, my city -- would reject me. It has been a dream that hit its fever pitch when I interned up there for three months in undergrad. And solidified this year, when Jeremiah moved up there and started building a home for us.

In three days, I will be ticking off my life dream.

I haven't really discussed much of my personal life on the blog this year. Part of it is because my blog has become a little more public, as I've opened up to more people in my program about it and have mentioned it in job interviews and things like that. 

Part of it is also that it has been a really hard year, being separated cross-country from Jeremiah. Our marriage was thrust into long distance very quickly when he moved up to New York, and I've been living down here, just finishing up school and work. On good days, the distance was my friend -- I could keep my head down, work on everything I needed to professionally without feeling pressure to come home at a reasonable hour. Personal projects (like building my online portfolio, learning to cook, writing spec scripts, hanging out with some of the best people ever) got done. And even small things like picking out my own groceries or taking the car wherever I wanted without consulting another person was a nice relief. And then there were the bad days -- being separated for months at a time, hating everything about living down in Georgia and feeling very stuck and lonely. 

I've mentioned before that I've essentially lived in the air space between New York and Georgia this year, as I've flown between the two every other month to visit Jeremiah and put all my dominoes together for a possible career and life up there. It's been weird, adjusting to figure out "home" -- having two residences but not feeling like I belonged at either of them. 

But.

None of that matters today.

Because today I'm picking up Jeremiah from the airport, and we'll be living together permanently in the same city. In three days I'll be trading my beloved car for public transit, and rural landscapes for skyscrapers.

I've learned a lot from Georgia in the last 17 years. I'll always have a soft spot for this state -- all of its beautiful, haunting and even twisted parts -- and the wonderful people here who I am fortunate enough to call family and friends.

In four days, I will be moving living in New York. And then I'll have to find a new life dream. 

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