I'm so happy but I don't know how to say it or show it or write it or do anything at all with it other than be it. All the reasons for my happiness are boring. Most of the things I do are boring. That's okay. I'm happy.

I haven't seen a newspaper in weeks or maybe months and I've left my own neighborhood all of two or three times since coming back to New York and I've not been checking my email or even my phone and I hear there are protests on wall street but what do I know, I've not been there. I feel cramped but I'm afraid to get out because everything everwhere is a shithole and I don't trust anyone. I'm wound up and consumed with, consumed as in eaten by, a job that I don't want but that I need if I plan on doing anything with myself. Here is what I plan: I plan on buying a new guitar and learning to play it so beautifully that people around fall to their knees and cry out. Failing that, I plan on being a marginally successful artist, and failing that, a teacher, and failing that, a corpse.

Tomorrow I'm leaving New York and I'm returning to the desert, but I'm doing so without a home there or any sort of clear plan of what I'm doing and I'm sick and sad and scared and I'm scrambling to get my affairs in order here and it's all so frustrating and terrifying that I feel as though I'm sleepwalking, because surely things haven't really become this way- how could they have- this is never where I pictured myself and this is never who I pictured myself to be and what am I doing oh what what what. As my grandpa says, though, when you're young you can somehow do whatever you want and money will never quite run out and you'll never quite lose hope and there will always be a lifeline, a new plan, a new place to go. I hope so much he's right because at present I have only 40$ to my name and a plane ticket to Phoenix.

It's been nearly a year. New York has been terrible and beautiful and transformative. I can't even tell you, I don't know how to put the words into sentences that make any sort of sense at all, I just feel like a hurricane has come through and hammered all of my ideas and emotions with five sorts of rains and winds, maybe more than five. Maybe ten or twenty. Maybe everything. It's finally over. Today I woke up with nothing at all to do and couldn't believe how sad I was about it.

Here's a story that I'd like to share: I fell madly in love with a boy, a nineteen-year-old musician, who lived next door to the man with whom I was supposed to be in love, and had a tempestuous three-week romance with him that brought all of my senses back to life after a year of having drowned them in zoloft. I saw my first firefly ever while sitting with this boy in a cafe and was so happy that I nearly cried.

He's gone now. He left yesterday. He decided to go to Iowa because there's harvesting work to be done there. He left his guitar with me. I am going to paint him a picture of fireflies and send it to him as soon as he finds himself a permanent address. I don't expect that to be soon.

I made it to New York! I've wanted to be here for so long and it is amazing, but I miss miss miss my best friend who left me this morning and is now on a plane back to Tucson. I love him. I miss him. I am not alone, though. My second-best friend- my little tabby cat- is stretched across my lap and yawning. She has come so far! She was born feral beneath creosote in arizona but now she is an apartment-dwelling new yorker with a pink bow on her collar.

I'm in Tucson again but in a week I'll be gone for good, I'll be out of this town, this surreal place that smells so strongly of creosote tonight as wind and rain rack the fences and lightning and lightning and lightning flashes all over the black and blue and rose sky. I'm in love with the Sonoran desert and its dusty-sweet scent and its atomic sunsets. I'm in love with my flock of doves and thrashers and cactus wrens. I'm in love. I'm heartbroken. In a week I'll be in New York while the only friends I've ever loved enough to die with or die for are half a world away.

Two nights ago, on an Oregon beach, a friend of mine collapsed into the sand with pale face and unsteady pulse. I stood on the road to wait for an ambulance and cried and imagined the waves rushing up to catch all of us and drown us and break us into little dull bits of bone.
Another time, only a few weeks earlier, I was in a completely different place with different people and as we drove along a twisting, treacherous ledge, I thought to myself, if we drive off the ledge and all die here, I'll still be happy. I'll be happy as we go down. I'll be happy that I'm with these people and that I won't have to die alone.