Peter Krupa

It has just started to sink in that I am leaving the United States for a long time. Like grief, an international move carries with it several emotional stages. The first is elation at the adventure ahead, and at this point the destination is an abstraction. Closer to the move date, one starts going out with friends for the last time, having those final drinks and shaking hands.

But the move doesn’t quite sink in until you start canceling magazine subscriptions, calling the phone company, buying your last Metro card, and looking around your apartment trying to decide what goes in the luggage, what on CraigsList, and what into the dumpster.

That is when you realize that life - understood as a steady ritual of day-to-day tasks carried out in a certain pattern, at certain times, and with certain conveniences and inconveniences - is about to change. The destination begins to take on an unsettling concreteness.

For me, it’s true that this international move won’t be so hard. I’ve lived in Costa Rica before. There will be a little culture shock while I re-remember how to get by in that country. Somehow though, it’s different than last time.

I think it’s because the last time I moved to Costa Rica, I did so as an adventurer. Costa Rica was one stepping stone in an on-going plot, and the discomfort and the pleasure were temporary. But the plot made a funny twist, and now I’ll be back in Costa Rica not as a stepping stone, but as the conclusion - at least for the foreseeable future.

It’s very strange, this certainty business. It apparently makes me introspective and maudlin.

That won’t last long, however, because the last emotional stage of an international move begins when I step onto the train with my life in my bags, and heft them in the line at the airport, and then board the plane with my carry-on. I will watch the tarmac drop away beneath me - for the last time, it always seems - and I will sip Costa Rican coffee brought to me by the flight attendant.

The Central Valley will look surprisingly green when the plane is landing, and the sun will be bright. I will gather my things from the overhead compartment and stand in the aisle with cold air blowing on my head from the vents. And when I step out of the plane onto the ramp, I will take a breath, and the air will be different.

The emotion at that point is, I think, elation again.