We're leaving, in about twelve hours, for Potsdam. I've written about it ad nauseum already. It's not a place I recall with fond memories, but it wasn't all bad. I remember getting together with friends to listen to Sunday Night Sex with Sue, and going to Stone Valley, and going through champagne and strawberries at alarming rates with my roommate Jen, and and a number of other fun things, and not-so-fun things. College had a lot of good times, and about as many bad, and my experience wasn't especially unique.

And it's a situation where I need to just get over myself, buck up, and go. So, we're going, and it will be fine. We'll see people I haven't seen in ten years, and some of them I'll hope to go another ten years before seeing again. We'll tell the same five or ten major life stories over and over again, and Willem and I have been together long enough that we're developing an unintentional routine around that sort of thing. We'll eat at a bunch of unreasonably good restaurants, and I'll do my best not to put on too many of those pounds I've scattered here and there over the past few months. It will be fine.

Every once in a while, I'll spend some time in a dark and brooding place, because that's what I did in college and if I'm returning to the scene of the crime, I may as well act the part. But to counteract, I'm bringing along a knitting project - a sweater that I am really, really jonesing for, but in this lovely, soft, mist-gray angora blend that I keep petting. I certainly won't finish it in a weekend, but I'll work on it a little, and will carry something positive out of the trip. Literally.

And I'll keep trying to clear my head of this visual I have, of another departure. One that happened last weekend. There was this guy. A client. Young; able to buy his own alcohol, but not old enough to know his way around the liquor store yet. Into a lot of different substances. Ostensibly seeking anger management but really looking for someone new to yell at. Complicated, chaotic life, with lots of violent episodes and unemployment and hurt and a sense of being uncontained, unfixable.

He was found dead on Saturday afternoon, of an apparently accidental overdose. He'd been in his father's house for the better part of twelve hours by then, and the estimates suggest he wasn't alive for most of that time. There was no note, hence the assumption that it was accidental. His father had been out since Friday, and came home in late afternoon to find him on the living room floor, rigor mortis already evident.

But he hasn't spent the day alone. His not-quite-two-year-old twins were there with him. In the playpen, next to him in the living room.

I wasn't there. I never actually met the client, or anyone in his family, or his babies. And yet I cannot get that image out of my head.

So, this weekend? The traveling, and the overindulgence, and the return to a place where I have never been not-depressed? It will be fine.