I started a new journey in 2006. Through 10 countries, my backpack got lighter while my dreams got heavier. So heavy that I couldn't escape them, no matter how many borders I crossed. I followed the heroes in my dreams, tracing their arcs on the razor's edge, plucking the bits of soul from their words and grafting it onto my own doubts, hoping that by stitching together all their sentences and paragraphs, I can run on and on, past the smallness of my world and into something beautiful. Beauty was in doing, in seeing and acting.
In 2007, my dreams led me home. Home was empty, home was sad. I needed to fill it with something, and so I filled it with my uncertain ambitions. I loved New York, I hated New York. I lived on the edge of homelessness and hated all my friends in investment banking. I wanted money and I hated myself for wanting money. With a little help from those East Village wine bars, dark and warm, I found a small voice. I followed my heroes again, heading west into the blue unknown and the great big promise that out west, all things are new, dreams are created and pasts broken – puff goes the magic, and it's all light and shiny and fun.
I landed in a city of paper dollhouses washed in colors. Unlike New York, where sharp edges made for tough singular ideas that strove for breathing space, San Francisco's edges were permeable, like the fog that shrouds its mornings and nights. Puff goes the magic – and the ideas here, free floating and suffused with humor, floated and bounced and tangled into one another, making purples and oranges and pinks, so that San Franciscan days weren't book ended by – they were the outpouring of those bewitching hours, of sunrises and sunsets blazing across limitless skies.
Standing at the beginning of 2008, I was another cog, hopeful still, but needing passion to hard wire my dreams. How'd it go? It's been a year where time slowed down. I slogged through the cubicle life, earning reprieve late in the year and dropping into what is the best job of my life so far. Life still isn't perfect – there are roots here but nothing is fully grown, and I'm beginning to wonder if I can ever be the person I want to be. At some point people don't change – I'm still the same person I was when I was 25, and that twentysomething was essentially the same person as the 19 year old kid. My dreams are still the same, but so are my faults, my distractions my fluctuations between colors.
2009? I have plans, oh sure - if time cooperates. I just need it to speed up – and I need to run, on and on.