Two months. That’s the number now. Not “sometime in September” — an actual, countable, circle-it-on-the-calendar number of weeks.
The visa’s in
The big one first: the IEC visa has been approved. After the first entry’s worth of research, second-guessing, and refreshing a government website more times than I’d like to admit, it’s done. Confirmed. Real.
I thought approval would feel like the finish line. It doesn’t, quite — it feels more like someone just moved the starting gun from “maybe” to “definitely,” and now the two months ahead are very much happening, whether I feel ready or not.
No shipping quotes — just suitcases
Here’s the bit I didn’t expect to be the emotional one: I’m not shipping anything. No container, no freight quotes, no “how many cubic feet is a life” spreadsheet. Just suitcases.
That means everything is getting sorted into three piles — coming, staying, gone — and the “gone” pile is bigger than I expected it to be. Things are being packed, slowly, a shelf and a drawer at a time, and every box that gets taped shut makes the suitcase-only version of this feel a little more real and a little more final.
There’s something clarifying about it, though. When your entire life has to fit in the bags you can carry, you find out fast what actually matters.
The part that’s actually hard
If I’m honest, the visa and the packing aren’t the hard part. The hard part is that I’m moving away from family — not a house sale, not a tenancy, just the plain fact of putting an ocean between me and the people I’ve spent every ordinary Sunday with for years.
I don’t have a tidy way to write about that yet. It’s not something a checklist fixes. So for now I’m just letting it sit alongside the excitement, the way it actually does in real life — not one feeling replacing the other, just both of them, most days, at the same time.
Two months, counting down
So that’s where things stand: visa approved, suitcases filling up, and a family goodbye I haven’t figured out how to write about properly yet. September isn’t an abstraction anymore — it’s a number of weeks I could count on my fingers if I wanted to.
More soon, as the suitcases fill up and the number gets smaller.