"One of the hardest things to realize is that our 'someday' is right now".

Relationships are strange beasts. They run the gamut from shallow to deep, from personal to professional, from real to imaginary. When one moves to the other side of the planet, the first things that are thrown into disarray are relationships. Suddenly, there is a readjustment of the connections you have to other people.

Maintaining these relationships in the context of your new location is also a new skill that must be learned. Instead of chatting over lunch or in the lounge everyday, you're e-mailing or Skype-ing or AIM-ing. The effort to maintain relationships with people becomes much more conscious and deliberate; no more running into people in the corridor, seeing them when you go to someone's birthday party, or grabbing a beer on Friday nights.

At the same time that you're trying to maintain your old relationships, you're inundated with new relationships: new co-workers, fellow students, bosses, teachers, friends. While we've all built relationships in our lives, having to do so many of them at once can be very overwhelming. Suddenly you have all new people in your life, while at the same time you're attempting to maintain the people that were in your life already.

In some ways it's as if you're living a double-life: the people who have known you for years are no longer privy to your daily routine, while the people around you have only limited access to the person you were before you arrived on their shore. All of the sudden, you are in complete control of the flow of information. No one has to know anything you don't want them to. The people in your old life only know of your new life what you tell them, and the people in your new life only know about you what you chose to let be known.

In talking with a friend of mine who is also overseas, we began to term these our Real Lives (the ones we came from and will return to) and our Fake Lives (the temporary ones we're in now). In your Fake Life you are, to a point, free of consequence in the long term; once your Fake Life ends and you go back to your Real Life, you again have control over what things you tell people. No one in your Real Life has to know that, in your Fake Life, you cheated on your significant other at a party one night or got arrested for public intoxication or killed a man with your bare hands and buried his body in the desert. It's a heady feeling, to be immune from consequence.

After a time, though, these lines start to blur. Aspects of each begin to change and meld together, mixing into a world you can no longer separate. Parts of your Fake Life begin to become part of your Real Life. Your apartment or your job stay in your Fake Life as they still have a definite ending point; but your new friends, your outlook on the world, your future goals, these intangible things start to change, slowly, without you realizing it at first.

Then, פתאום, you no longer have control over your Lives. You realize that parts of your Fake Life are going to return with you to your Real Life, regardless of if you want them to or not. The knowledge you've gained, the relationships you've built, the changes you've undergone; these things aren't going to end when you get on a plane to return to your Real Life. It starts to occur to you that you're no longer the person that arrived in this Fake Life; not only have parts of your Fake Life become your Real Life, but parts of you have become part of your Fake Life too.

So you start re-evaluating things. What does "Real" mean? Going back to graduate school, which also a temporary world with a finite ending date? Was that a Fake Life, too, and you just didn't realize it? Does that make your Fake Life actually your Fake-Fake Life? If so, what happened to your Real Life? And if you've become part of your Fake (Fake-Fake?) Life, does that therefore make it your Real Life?

For the people you've met since your arrival and who live in your new-found home, your Fake Life is their Real Life. It's a weird juxtaposition wherein they're part of your Fake Life while you're part of their Real Life. But, then, if your Fake (Fake-Fake?) Life is actually your Real Life, then maybe that match isn't so strange.

Then it begins to occur to you that there are no Real and Fake (or Fake-Fake) Lives. These are merely ways for us to plan and categorize things, but that they don't really exist. Being overseas is just as real as being home, albeit in a very different way. There's nothing fake about the friends your make, or the knowledge you gain, or the places you visit.

Sure, some things in your new situation are temporary but so are things at home. For me, returning to Gallaudet to finish my last 22 credit hours is very temporary; I'll be back at Gallaudet less time than I've been in Israel. Then it's a temporary internship for 12 months, then a temporary post-doc. Because they're not permanent does that make them not Real, make them Fake? Of course not. Israel is no different.

That's when you realize that life is upon you, that always concentrating on the future leaves you in danger of neglecting the present. And you realize that you can make changes now, and that nothing in the future is certain. That 'someday' and 'today' aren't different. That it's time to live.