Ruminations from my last night at home (Rambling; vaguely melancholic)

I've only moved twice in my life. By my age, my mum had moved to a different country on her own, and a lot of people have moved house, as I did a couple of years ago. At the time, it was big and scary, but I had my parents and a semi-greying Labrador to keep me company.

I'm moving again. In and of itself, this isn't unusual; a good chunk of people my age, on the cusp of adulthood, move away, and some of them even to other countries, or an eight-hour drive away, which I might have done had I not been offered a place at Oxford. But I was, and now moving two hours away seems like a gaping void of a distance, miles of bland British space between myself and everything I know.

In many ways, it's a blessing to be as close to my parents as I am. Most people my age that I know of aren't--and while I don't know whether that makes moving away easier, I think it makes moving out harder for me. But I'm a pretty typical human: I don't like change, but my entire life is about to be upended and shaken about into a brand new shape. I think I'll like it, but then again, it's still new.

Today has been busy--a rehearsal for tomorrow! After a bout of my classic insomnia, I slept in and then spent my first hour awake irate over it, before packing. And packing. And packing. Hard to fathom how much stuff I've acquired until I'm trying to shove it into IKEA FRAKTA bags that seem, inexplicably, to have shrunk in size since I last saw one. My 'uni packlist aurgh' Keep list is well over fifty items long and I certainly felt the strain. But here I am, many hours of nauseating stress later, with a near fully packed car (credits to my mum and her years of packing for endurance rides) and a room which is not empty but certainly feels it. Hopefully this means that my Oxford room will feel cozy?

Tomorrow I will meet all the faceless names on the Somerville Freshers group chat and they will be people instead of amorphous blobs, and I will plonk my eight different bulging bags into a generic little room, and my parents will drive away to watch me become an adult from afar (not too far: I've been promised visits). No amount of burying my face in Roxie's fur or doing Guardian crossword can delay the fact now. It is inevitable. I am going to Oxford University and I will not come back the same.

My dad would call it a new adventure, and with that I agree.

Goodnight :)