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.