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 I 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! 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 the thing I had discovered in early September 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.