slipping away

Is it strange of me to find the idea of leaving town forever kind of interesting? I mean, I'm not on the lam here trying to evade the feds or child support payments or anything like that. I don't need to disappear completely at all. Though reading about how it might be done was certainly edifying. I think the only thing I'd even begin to consider applying to my own life though is the bit on "dropping off the grid".

Apparently Wired ran a piece a couple years ago about how to achieve different levels of invisibility and while a few of them seem like easy enough and good ideas to adopt in the interest of improved privacy, they don't, for me, really address the idea of packing up and severing ties to people and a place.

I guess a lot of it is that I don't really want to sever ties completely with anybody. Maybe it's cowardice or some other weakness but I don't think I can honestly say that I'm mentally prepared to truly turn my back on somebody forever. But, that's not something I should really be worried about either, I think. For example, take my exit from my hometown of Harvard, MA. I suppose technically I did leave for a few months before finishing high school, but that was only 4 months, and when I came back, not much had changed. All the people I knew before were still there, and while in some ways slightly different, for the most part, were all still the same.

The end of the Summer before my freshman year of college though, people started heading out to school, all before I did on account of the somewhat frustrating quarter system we adhere to, and I felt as if I was saying real goodbyes. I haven't really been back much since, either. My family all moved away that year, and since we no longer have a home there, we don't go back much. I went back a couple times after starting College, to visit friends who were still there, but I stopped seeing most of the people I knew from school. A small group of good friends is all that I kept in real touch with, and now, they too have all moved away from Harvard.

It was weird, the weekend after the fourth of July, we drove by our old house in Harvard so my sister could pick up this guitar we'd left in storage. After we grabbed the guitar, and saw my the house occupied by yet another family of strangers (it looked less and less like the house I remember), we did a quick drive through the center of town. The high school had a bunch of work done on it, and so looked very different as we drove by. It created for me this very strange sense of being somewhere entirely new, because so little looked familiar.

But I've completely sidetracked myself. Well, not entirely, I suppose, as at the end of this year, I imagine I'm going to be in a similar situation again. I'm going to be packing my things, and hopefully pursuing gainful employment somewhere else new. I wonder who I'm going to make an effort to keep in touch with, who will make an effort to keep in touch with me, or if I might just consider moving without telling anybody, then getting back in touch a year down the line having completely relocated myself?

I feel like I only ever think about this when I get sort of frustrated with how things are going and I feel trapped or something. I wonder if ever I'll get to a point where I'm just so fed up I start packing up. But that's what's strange - I'm really having a great time this Summer. But in spite of that, I have these daydreams of just driving off. Well, actually, more like hopping on a bus, retreiving a car under false pretenses and then driving off, but, close enough.