a million years ago with rachel ten in my backyard in oakland when i lived with laura and tracey

I am sitting at my gate at Dulles Airport in DC . . . I fly to Paris in an hour and a half. In the morning, I will transfer at Charles de Gaulle to Berlin, and then I will be back in my apartment for the first time since August. My dad is staying at my sister’s apartment on the ground floor, and my friends in Berlin keep asking me when we can hang out . . . I know that I should feel happy in a sense but I don’t. I don’t really feel anything at all.

Just now I opened Photobooth and saw some of the pictures I had taken of myself in my friends’ apartments between August and November . . . and looking upon myself in the live camera right now at the airport, I just see a version of Ryan grown thinner and more exhausted hovering over thumbnails of all those other happier Ryans.

This is one of those Ryans in Cera’s apartment in Los Angeles back in October:

Listen: I know this is dumber than hell, but I am envious of this freshly showered and well-moisturized Ryan. What a dope! He had no idea how good he had it. This was on October 8th, the day before I drove through the night from LA to the Bay Area, and then promptly boarded the Hesh Van in Vallejo to travel with Harrison and McCune through Northern California and Nevada and Utah and Idaho well into the center of Montana to BOND in NATURE and BATHE in HOT SPRINGS. I know now that when I took this photo, this was the true beginning of the whole trip . . . this was the exciting moment in time where a thing I had discovered quite by accident began to build upon itself from the inside out day after day, and me always wondering at where it would go . . . From the back of the van, while barreling through forests and high deserts and alien landscapes, I would lie on the mattress with my head tilted up, looking out at the world upside down as it flew past the windows, and I would begin to dream of a place, every day going on in this way as the dream grew larger and more elaborate, and finding it so exciting that I could not imagine where that place may be, but trusting that wherever it was would be a place I had never been before, and a place where I could lie down and safely stay. And now, like the fella said, with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. . . .

They have told me the plane boards in ten minutes. I almost feel sick to my stomach about it . . . it’s nobody’s fault but my own, that I did all this dreaming, but now I return to Berlin almost as though this entire trip had never even happened . . . It was so exciting to not know what my life would look like when I got to this day. Now I know exactly what it looks like. I just wish I could go back to that day in Cera’s apartment when I had dreamed up something different.

peekaboo the dog and me

savannah, georgia

(taken by rory)

showed dear isabella part of the first chapter of my work-in-progress novel

penultimate day in the united states

i am starhugger

(love you, steph)

thank you leila

i feel like this is how i text people lol

This morning when I woke up, I felt that a stone in the foundation of myself had shifted ever so slightly. I felt calm and clear-headed. It had been a little while.

So I went about reviving some posts from Sept / Oct / Nov, deleting or archiving posts I wrote in the last two weeks when I was in a highly emotional state (and presently find no value in revisiting), and cleaning up some posts that sounded just a little too mopey.

In times of distress, I have a bad habit of turning this place into a big pity party for myself. I am trying to temper this bad habit. For now I merely cleaned up the mess that was no one’s fault but my own and restored balance here, just as some degree of balance had been mysteriously restored unto me. Wow!

The Japanese poster for KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE famously says . . .

おちこんだりもしたけれど、
私はげんきです。

. . . which means, I’m pretty sure, something like

“I was kind of blue for a while, but I’m fine now.”

OK!!! Yeah. That’s fitting. I dig that.

☆彡