documenting my excitement in real-time can feel naïve or embarrassing for me because i feel it so firmly in the moment, knowing it will change in about 2 hours and then i will look back and laugh/cringe/roll my eyes at myself. for the next 30 minutes i will shirk this embarrassment and write how i feel because clarity always comes from honesty. (though –– as an aside –– honesty does not always singularly lead to clarity, i have found. all squares are rectangles, not all rectangles are squares. the clearest path is the one you forge for yourself.)

while crossing a bridge over a canal today and picturing myself staying here longer, it really began to sink in that i am free –– and actually have been this whole time. i can go wherever i want, i just have to decide. it struck me, and not for the first time, that any/all pathways i have tasted i have loved and imagined a future in. that while in the flow of things, whichever fig i am holding in the current moment is the sweetest of the bunch. this has been true for career stuff, but also: cities, apartments, school subjects, fabrics, foods, favourite colors, crushes (well duh on this one i guess) and pretty much anything else there is to be excited about.

then everything changes in an instant. the previous instant immediately feels silly. i am getting better at honoring those flow states for what they were, but still there are instances where i look back on myself perhaps how a teacher looks at a young and starry-eyed teenager: smiling knowingly and too kind to say "it will all be different tomorrow."

i know that after this lease is up i want to be out of los angeles. the plan was always to end up in new york city. three days out of the usa now and i want to end up in amsterdam. tomorrow i have a flight somewhere else and i will want to end up there, somewhere else, and three days after that i will go to another somewhere else and... yeah.

i have heard from friends, on just about any topic, "oh you think __ is good?? wait until you try __." and then i do and there is a new thing to love.

enough times and i start to get overwhelmed by my own excitement, or not trust it because maybe it will run like water through my hands.

as soon as something new and shiny comes into frame, i go for it. this seems to have worked out for me thus far –– quite nicely, in fact. both five-year plans i have formulated for myself have imploded after about one and a half years (once with and once without my conscious decision, though both to my benefit), and i have carried onwards and upwards. i feel like a big ball of potential energy –– silent, active, unstable, beautiful. i feel like the copper bottom of a cooking pot, heating and cooling rapidly. i feel like i am constantly waiting for the elevator with both buttons pressed.

i think i would be happy plopped into any metropolitan city with this zest for life and all the doors open. i have been happy in the whackest of circumstances, and in la and ny and atlanta and boston and now amsterdam and in class and at work and alone and in my friends' living room and in a stranger's arms and in my bedroom and underwater.

i think, ultimately, i'm just happy to be here. i only need to decide where the next "here" is.