It is February and I have just been broken up with. My inner monologue is an unpublished Leonard Cohen album. I think it is full of beautiful melancholy, but that is the same part of me that enjoyed Great Expectations when I was younger. That is the fool in me. I am probably being unfair to myself.
I drink two full glasses of water and begin to pad to my bedroom when I feel a distinct moment of awareness. Awareness that I am making a rash decision, that I am being foolhardy after a lifetime of deliberation and carefulness. I have the feeling that my trip the next day will end in disaster. My instincts know the way, but I am not listening to them. I am listening to the Leonard Cohen album of my soul. I go back to my bedroom (which has no bed) and I check my luggage again. I have never left the United States before, much less left the continent; tomorrow I am flying to Korea to teach English. My home is emptied, sitting in a storage unit downtown.
I love to travel; I am only mildly irritated by the process of flying. There is a book in my