Monday, November 6, 2006

No turning back

The child bride and I are scheduled to be on a plane tomorrow. The plane is flying from London Gatwick to Minneapolis.

We won't be on it.

When we bought our tickets to move here we found it was cheaper to purchase return flights rather than singles ("cheaper to purchase roundtrip rather than one-way," for those of you playing along at home). Hoping to get the best price on the tickets, I set their return date for well out of the summer season and before the holiday season -- 7 November.

A few weeks ago, when things were so bad and I was feeling like I had made a huge irreversible mistake by moving here, I found myself staring at those tickets. I don't know how serious I was about it, but I was aware that they were my last best chance to give up. If I wanted to crawl back home and try to quietly fall back into the same old routines that had once frustrated me so much that I dropped everything and moved 5,000 miles away, these tickets were it.

We don't have the money now to buy any other tickets. When that plane takes off tomorrow morning and we aren't on it there will be no contingency plan -- despite the sage of advice of Bruce Willis in "Armageddon." We can only succeed from here. Or fail really, really big.

As Omega said, "You're living the dream. But no one said it would be a nice dream."

It's a good sign, though, that I had managed to forget about the tickets over the last week. I was reminded only by the e-mail from Northwest airlines offering to let me check in for my flight online.