the start

what does one do the night before an adventure?  Sleep?  Rest?
Or does one just stay up all night, dreading or anticipating the dawn, or both in equal measure?

This is the worst part, the waiting.  Tomorrow morning, I'm going to be leaving the only home I've ever known to go to my home for the next nine months.  Everyone says it's going to be great.  Everyone says it's going to be fun.  Everyone says this is the time of my life.
But is it?
Right now, the time of my life looks like a dark abyss between now and when my alarm goes off, and I'm scared to put my foot forward for fear that I'll fall off the cliff and die alone in the darkness.  Maybe there's a bridge.  Maybe there isn't.  Maybe I'll find the bridge and fall off.
Maybe the reason it's the time of my life, of everyone's life, is because they're glad they crossed that bridge - that rickety bridge over the two-hundred-foot abyss - in the middle of the night.
What's on the other side?
I don't know.  You never know until you get there.
Maybe it's the time of everyone's life because there's two sorts of people in the world: those who stay on this side forever, or those who get so hyped up on the adrenaline of getting there that they forget how terrifying the drop is.  They focus so on going forward that they don't have time to look back until they get there.

Until tomorrrow, I don't know for certain which side I'll be on.

This is the hardest night.
This is why I'm scared of the dawn.
Maybe I'll wake up and find that I'm still halfway across.
Maybe that's the reason everyone crosses in the dark.  Even though the darkness presses at night, when the light comes the ground falls away and you see how far it is to the ground.  When you see it, that's when your gut turns and your instinct yells at you to go back if you want to survive.  The darkness is the security net.
But that doesn't make it any more appealing.
Now is the darkness.

I will write again when the light comes, and I hope to say that I made it to the other side.

Farewell.