Okay scratch the Hillary and I swapping stories story at this point. It didn't really work out the way I wanted it to. I need to let that one marinate for a bit longer before I commit anything to paper.
Instead I started in on the story about the trip to England, Scotland and Ireland I took with some students in my English department during my undergraduate work. I'm five pages in and those took me about two hours to write. I'm a compulsive editor, which is a no-no, I realize, but I can't help it. It's become part of my process. So I just roll with it. Five pages, two hours...not too shabby.
I'm realizing as I write it that it seems a lot like fiction to me or like I'm telling someone else's story. In the three week window we were across the pond nothing was the norm. That seems obvious because it's another country. But I mean it like, all of my day to day routines were gone. I wasn't walking from the house on Main down to campus for class or smoking on our giant second floor balcony with Amy or talking on the phone until 1 a.m. with my boyfriend. I was with people I hardly knew, sans boyfriend, no family, the venue was constantly changing. So in my memory, it's like this little carved out piece of time that doesn't match up with the life I was living at the time.
I was a different person there. I'm sure it was part the person I wanted to be and part the me that I was when I wasn't being the me I thought other people wanted me to be. On the flight someone hit the reset button and I got to try out a different version of myself.
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