I-87. Between exits 10 and 9, going south. I’m confused by all the Florida license plates on the road. The light snow from the night before had coated the “I ♡ NY” design on the slant of the hill beside the highway under an onion skin layer of fade, as if someone had halfway finished erasing it out. Then it zips by. The rest stop, zip. Familiar towns and exits, they disappear off the face of the Earth as we pass them. I’m afraid the road is eroding behind us. I don’t dare look back.

Around familiar bends and over the Twin Bridges. I’m listening to a song I’ve liked for many years now, but for some reason there’s some kind of foreign element hovering between the notes. Every drum kick, every string plucked and syllable pronounced are demarcated by an entity that warps the sound of each accentuation, almost like time itself is being bent in half and sound followed suit. I’m hearing this version of the song for the first time. I try cutting the whiteness out and listen closer, deeper, it’s like every part of the song is playing or singing through a filter with some kind of accent. It’s my mind playing tricks.

I’m going to Ireland, and my mind’s so overloaded with anticipation and expectation it decides to mess with me. Maybe I’d hear another accent in the song if I were going somewhere else.

My parents sit quietly in the front, listening to NPR. While I never count on reading my father’s expressions, I can usually make pretty accurate guesses with my mother. She has a way of furrowing her brow or twitching that speaks chapters, in our own little non-verbal language. But even now, from my angle in the backseat, she’s a book that’s been closed and shelved. Just looking forward, receded inside herself, listening to Congress talk petty politics and watching the edge of the Hudson Valley come toward her. Both of them have given me a gift that I feel too guilty to accept.

I consider the demons I might have inside me and if I might be able to expel them when I’m there. The flaws I harbor and the wrongs I’ve wronged all begin taking vague shapes in cloud form inside me. I begin questioning my worth. A paralyzing self-analysis. What fires have I left blazing and where are the scorch marks I’ve left behind? For sure, my destination is a reward that’s been granted to the wrong person.

Then my tongue feels bitter, realizing that’s an uncharacteristically melodramatic way for me to think, yet I know deep down, deeper than I care to look, I’m undeserving.

Albany, Kingston, Poughkeepsie…past the lattice towers and highway escarpments and granite fields and brown wilderness, and I’m wondering if where I’m going will be lusher than here. The sky seems to saturate more as we drive toward its color. It’s setting now, over the Catskills, over the Pacific and over and over the world all over again and I’m thinking, Shit, I’m leaving soon.

Cranes loom past the trees…a tunneled conveyor belt, an abandoned foundry…the mountains blacken and things start to disappear…snapshots of friends’ basements and taking a train from Belle Harbor to Brooklyn and sitting on a swing set when I’m six flash around in my head and I don’t know why. I’m not feeling nostalgic, nor afraid, but my greater senses are telling me this, this right here, this is the end of something, an end that I’m barreling toward like a rocket shooting toward the moon. No, I’m not going to compare this to stepping onto the moon. That’s my mind inflating and making everything monumental. What a childish example.

But I’ve reverted to a childlike way of thinking as the car continues south. I feel like sinking into the leather seats, looking up out the window at the passing trees and think thoughts with an imagination that only a young boy possesses.

As the sky continues to darken, the color pallet becomes melancholic, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, or even if such a change in the sky can be good or bad. My throat feels stuffed with wood. My mind continues playing tricks and makes my body feel stuck between phases of matter. I shrink, solidify and become rock-like in petrification, yet I’m a fluid pouring down the highway as everyone else pours silently in the opposite direction.

But then this all clashes and now I feel like I’m already airborne, with all the common side-effects; my ears fill with pressure, then pierce as if someone’s jabbing an icepick through my skull; my head aches; my muscles tighten. I look to my parents, who are still watching the highway unfold in front of them.

It’s dark now. We’ve been driving for some time. Maybe it’s the Hudson we’re following, but we’re following a river with little boat docks and two-story cabins and craftsmen homes like the little Cape towns in Massachusetts. The peaceful orange glow radiating from the windows of those homes suggest that time doesn’t march by in this part of the state, but instead strolls languidly, humming a tune with thumbs in pockets.

I’ve changed the song I’m listening to many exits back, but I’m not tuned into it enough to recite the lyrics. Some song about the city of Baltimore. Oh man, those red brick rowhouses. How I’d love to live in one of those. But where I’m going certainly isn’t Baltimore. It’s got rowhouses, but it’s no place as familiar as Baltimore.

Half the cars on the road have Jersey plates by the time we get to Newburgh. We hook west toward New Windsor, and pretty soon pull in front of a building that looks more like a casino, both in size and façade, than an airport. Park, get my luggage and walk in, weigh my things and get my passport checked. Now I’m standing in front of my parents, ready to go through baggage inspection. But I’m not ready. They’re looking at me now, having asked me all their questions and made all their reminders, less waiting for something and pressing some sort of finality to the situation with their silence.

I don’t know if it’s set in for them yet. I don’t think it’s set in for me.

I don’t know if that’s the normal course of emotion, but I’m sure when I’m there and all alone, sitting in the silence, breathing in the new air, it’ll hit, and that irretraceable force will begin pulling on me the way longing usually does. I can read a little bit on my mother’s face, but not enough to pin anything down. She probably doesn’t want anything to show. Not when I’m still here.

I give them final, tight hugs, and set off, going through the carry-on inspection and heading up the staircase to the terminals, my parents disappearing on the floor below. I’m suddenly very hungry, and I take some comfort in that physical, primitive feeling—no trickery in that, no sir—and go buy some overpriced cashews at the dinky little convenient shop, and then head toward a seat next to a window facing east, passing a human douche with a man bun muttering to his North Face friend, “…fuck you in the ear…” I just take the seat by the window and eat. I’m there for three hours, revolving around the same thoughts over and over again…

…and now I’m on the plane, and we’re taxiing horizontally across the three runways going out into the bleak night toward Newburgh. Through the window, the world looks like that old arcade game, Battlezone, with how the runways and approach towers blink 8-bit lights and color the distant mountains with vector graphics. Then the plane turns onto the far runway and that all disappears. The turbines scream and the plane slingshots down the runway, taking off at about 300 miles per hour.

The land below falls away, the cars at first going down the streets like toy models, the trees made out of static grass and lichen moss, the whole spread of land like one of those museum models of a battlefield under plexiglass. Then it falls away even more, and now it’s a reverse sky, the stars just a few thousand feet below me, the lights of civilization forming constellations along highway routes and connecting at the kinetic patches of cities.

The retracting color of the Earth pulls me back to when I’m a little kid again, wandering through the pine forest and feeling so small in the world.

Then the clouds. Then the Atlantic Ocean. Darkness. I fall asleep for five hours…

…and wake up with the sun so low to the rim of the ocean, it looks like it’s rising from the North. I check the time: 2:23. I look out the window at a sliver of land, maybe 10,000 feet below. Another one of those Revolutionary War models I’ve seen as a kid. I’ve grown comfortable with feeling like a kid at this point. I’ve accepted it as normal. The land disappears, the plane dips and turns, and then the land reappears, this time a massive expansion spreading opposite the sun. Where was the rest of this land before?

I hadn’t seen it until the plane turned around, but now we are descending and circling the estuary, mountains on either side, and angling for landing. As we approach, the rural outskirts of Dublin and its backroads and farm homes string along, turning with the Earth, and we drop lower, lower, cars distinctive now, the tips of the mountains coming to eye level—

…and then we land, cu-thunk, just like that. This is a part of life you have to put a stamp on, I’m thinking. You have to cling to every little detail, because this is one of those moments where the joints are placed and see that your life goes in a new direction, remember every little detail…

…and then I’m outside, waiting for my bus downtown, to my new home for the next 20 weeks.

The air is a lot fresher hear; the coolness and the humidity combine to completely wash out the lungs and purify everything. It invades my pours and freezes my blood, but I don’t even care; I’m swimming in a new pool, even if the water is cold. The sky is tinged with a purple visor. The grass is greener than anything I’ve ever seen. Out loud, I say, “God damn,” and the twenty-something year old woman, who I had seen on the plane over, now standing a few paces away, gives me a side glance and grins. All I want to do is breathe in that air, look at that sun rise…

…and maybe sleep. That jet lag will catch up to me sooner or later.