Endings...and Beginnings

     Well. Today was my last day of the course. Officially, we graduate tomorrow, but I don't have to come in for class because I taught today, and I don't need to attend the job fair. That's right everyone, I have a job! Again, it's not quite official, but I received a job offer and have informally accepted it. I'll be teaching at a preschool here in Prague that also runs after school activities for school-age kids. Like most of the all-English preschools here, it's very expensive and the kids do yoga and take field trips, put on plays and celebrate various holidays (specifically: Czech, British, and American. Thanksgiving, anyone?). I have yet to actually visit the school, but I feel like this is the direction I'm being led in. I have never felt so much assurance as I have these last couple months. Everything is falling into place, and I have no doubt that I'm where I'm meant to be. I don't have an apartment yet, but I have a couch to crash on, and several possibilities floating around right now.
     Of course, with all this excitement about starting to live real lives here comes sadness that the family we've created over the past month is going to disperse. Endings are hard. I don't like endings. I especially don't like endings when it means saying goodbye to people I've only just started to open up to and have found to be wonderful people. Not that they weren't before, because of course they were. But, being an introvert, it takes me a while to open myself up to new faces, and let others see the crazy, poetic, naive, and optimistic person my family and friends know me as. That was just starting to happen, and now we're all leaving. Obviously, we're not all leaving Prague. In fact, most people are staying here, even those who thought originally that they were going to go elsewhere. But there are those who are moving away. And even those of us who are staying, it won't be nearly the same. We've grown used to seeing each other everyday in class, laughing over ridiculous grammar and eliciting techniques, cramming in last minute lesson prep together. There's just no way we can sustain that. We're going to have jobs, and live in different parts of the city. We're going to be real people.
     Leaving TEFL tomorrow, certificate in hand (because I did pass, y'all. Grammar test and everything.) is going to be hard. It has been such an eye-opening month, both personally and professionally (if you'll allow me to call a job I have yet to start my profession). I've learned so much, and grown in ways I cannot even begin to describe.
     I'm going to borrow an analogy from Virginia Woolf, if I may. In "Mrs. Dalloway", Richard talks about strings that connect people to each other, and the further away you go, the tighter they stretch, until, for most people, they inevitably break. I love that thought, that we're connected to people by stretchy strings. But I don't like the part about them breaking. The tugs of the strings are thousands of times better than not having them at all, or having lost them to time and distance. So I'm going to do my best to keep that from happening. I cannot stand the idea of losing you all so soon after having found you. I mean this from the bottom of my heart. Let's not allow those strings to break. Let's keep them strong. Change is inevitable, but that doesn't mean everything has to rearrange itself. We all have plenty of room in our hearts. Let's keep each other there. If that means travelling to various places around the world in order to see each other so be it. I guess I can live with that.