Nothing makes me laugh or smile quite like I do when I find myself in the summer rain without an umbrella. Finally the breaking of humidity.

New plan,

I’ve finished my fourth year of university, but not my last. A recent visit to my department’s academic advisor showed me I have 2.5 credits left to graduate, which was expected (switched programs after 1st year, I’m a term behind). 

Finishing this school year made me realize how much I don’t want it to be my life. I had plans to go do a Masters in something impractical, and then just keep studying and researching until I die. I realized I don’t need a post-grad degree to do those things. And I realized I don’t need a post-grad degree to get the jobs I truly want. It’s the craziest thing to realize the life you had planned for is not the life you want. I’m so excited. 

• finish degree part-time, work and save.
• pack up the small amount of things I value and move to Montreal.
• work, save, be a twenty-something. 
• be able to drive to Maine in less than 5 hours.
• and eventually, move/immigrate to the US.

This life thing, man. 

My journal is becoming more like a workbook,
a sculpture,
I’m trying to fill in the blanks.
I’m trying to find my lines. 

I know I am filling and finding and growing.
This summer will be good, but not in the way I expected. 

Today, instead of doing anything I had planned to do, I went and sat on the floor of a record shop for a couple hours. New records is such a good feeling. I got:

Otis Redding - Lonely and Blue
Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams - That’s What Friends Are For
Air Supply - The One That You Love
Lawrence Welk - Yellow Bird
H2O - All That Glitters (Rusts In Time) Single
Earth, Wind and Fire - The Best Of
Roberta Flack - Blue Lights in the Basement
Johnny Mathis - Close To You
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass - The Brass Are Comin’

I’m so excited. 

My refrigerator sings me to sleep, 

there is peace here. It is quiet and it is hidden. There’s nothing original I can say about this sense of “becoming” I feel. Maybe that’s okay. I’ll settle into my unoriginality and say,

Life is beautiful. Being 21 is quite the fucking experience, and no one really warns you about it. I think that’s okay too. Not having everything together and being able to feel and think and process and churn out daily me, who I am, makes me smile like

I feel like I’ve found centre. Like I’ve squeezed and scraped this heart-skin into so many different and incorrect spaces, and have finally found the right one.

This is the life I am going to live. That feels like a title to a story. If I only ever make one statement in my life, I want it to be that. I want to learn to yell that as loud as I can. My Statement of Purpose. 

Spring night,

I had a half-asleep dream of you, a quarter of a continent away, drifting away further from me into a dream-filled ocean, your bed a giant wooden apple crate. I’m drifting there too. Lets meet in the middle.

Today, 

8 more hours of packing cans of beer into boxes,
thinking about how the human body doesn’t make a very good machine. 

Breathe in, Mid-May chilled like late-October. Shea body butter, fresh grapes for lunch, the rest of the week to read and plan and reflect and hope. 

Today will be a good day. 

Quiet day,

cold day. It freezing rained on me on my fresh air clear my head walk to the corner store.

Waiting to build a finish line. To interweave months with markers. To not float through any more days.

Everything blooming bright in the cold windy rain

I’m inexpressibly excited for being alive today. Sometimes breaking open grey clouds seem to be searching. I got through an interview today with Public Outreach, and am 1/3 of the way to having what sounds like the most amazing summer job.

Today is cafes and morning glory muffins and sleepiness from a night texting with B till 4. This isn’t restless excitement but steady constant joy and heart smiling that maybe my life is moving in a direction that I wanted but hadn’t anticipated.

The humid tension in the air tells me it’s going to pour.

Today has been

• slow out of bed
• shoe shopping
• half off shea body butter
• a surprise phone interview/pending group interview
• 50 pages of Tender is the Night
• surprise meet up with a friend in my new favourite cafe
• blasting Alla Rakha
• lyrics open singing along to Beneath the Medicine Tree

dreaming. hoping.