Sometimes life seems ridiculously simple, you know? Like everything falls neatly into place, and the future spreads out before me in one coherant path, with the leaves nicely raked and plenty of light to prevent any feelings of ominousness.

This is not one of those times.

Lately I've been feeling myself shift somehow, and suddenly the certainty with which I've looked at things seems a bit shady. Maybe it's not my goals that are shifting so much as my priorities. I mean, school is still my core focus. It has to be, it's way too expensive to be a sideline. But there are other priorities emerging, like getting Wendy out here and still others that I'm not ready to divulge just yet. I mean, I knew when I came back here that I didn't know where I'd be two years from now, but never has that been more true than now. And it feels kind of strange, really. I mean, for most of my life I've felt that there was somewhere, a specific place, where I'd belong. I guess I built it up like a first kiss, where the heavens would part and spill golden light on me the second I set foot into this place. So it's odd that I'm starting to think of places and locations and destinations as essentially arbitrary. I mean, I'm not thinking of moving to the frozen tundra of Eastern Slabovia, mind you, but what I mean is that I'm starting to think of place as something you adjust to be around the right people. Fortunately Wendy seems to want to make that adjustment right now, and I'd be more than happy to have her here. And two years from now? Where, who knows what will happen when we roll the dice again. Eventually, though, I would like to find a place where I feel safe declaring a "permanent address" different from the one back home.

And it's also becoming hazy to me my exact plan after graduation. I don't know if I'll be ready to dive right into grad school, or if I want to take a year off and remember why I hate the real world enough to leave it for the warm folds of mother academia. But again, this is even subject to change. Sometimes I have days that make me want to shed my worldly posessions in favor of a job featuring a treehouse in Zimbabwe, and photographing apes. Sometimes I have days that make me feel like the world is no place for me at all. And sometimes I have days where the center of my mind grows so large and cavernous that it seems like everyone and everything else are a million miles from me and that nothing will ever enter my space again, and it's a massively lonely feeling, and it makes me feel incredibly small and isolated. It's like, all it would take to make me feel a part of something is to hear someone speak my name, but no one sees me. I almost feel like a ghost sometimes.