Notes of a Twenty-Something-Year-Old

I wonder if some part of me was running, while I gathered up my thrills in wanderlust; scattering them like dust to the fire, that feeds a lazy afterglow. The Adventure of Wonder. The one I embellish just a little, because that time away is my big trophy full of glitter. I can't hardly reach in without distortion. My portion of that place was different than I expected- a beauty exceeding the dreams I'd constructed from photographs, but it was tamed and balanced-out. Tugged under gray skies like a great god asleep in some hidden cave beneath a thriving city. And I made to-do lists daily, as I'd done in college to ease the pressure (with specially constructed spots for sightseeing) And some days when I wandered off to little Irish villages, I looked for better places to stuff the notes of future plans. (I found them everywhere) I found them even in the glare of the rocky cliffs that stood naked to Atlantic winds. And I shoved them in and went off and saved them inside my tiny travel-friendly lap-top, which I took even on days that I felt like a god, because no one I knew would ever walk the same places I had. I grew up and I grew proud and then lost it again, when plans collided with the world that was. And the cycle repeated; It still does. And when the day finally came that I descended hazy-eyed from the journey of dreams, I felt the same as the day I left. That familiar blend of joy and thrill and anxiousness, that leaves my chest tight for days. Weeks passed before I grieved. A dancer in Leeds once told me: sometimes all you need is a new pair of eyes not a destination. I believed her, and I still do. And I'm happier too, when I see the faces of the ones I'd missed; the memory of something lost still fresh. But then there's that other feeling, the one I let take me across the Atlantic like a stranger with welcoming eyes (that somehow seem familiar) that has me writing everything down, arming against disaster. Only now the notes die faster. I wave them off hoping in the future (when that twenty-something year-old sense of urgency dies, or transcends into realities of peacefull coping) I can use them as a witness to myself, and they'll tell me nothing's lost in the breakdown. Everything just comes and goes. And whether we've never had it, or we have it all, I think I'll never know. There are those things we must learn to let go.