These are excerpts from various word documents, sticky notes, and notebook pages that I unearthed while cleaning my room and backing up my computer, now that it is summer and I have nothing better to do.

19 January, 2012

It’s 6:22 am California time, and I’m sitting jet lag in Grandma’s upstairs bedroom. This happens about once a year, and I never feel as peaceful (in an odd way) as I do here in Sunset, San Francisco. I often imagine myself on a map, a tiny dot next to the Golden Gate Park, near City Lights (where Ginsberg read), blocks away from Haight Ashbury, by the bay where millions of dollars have been earned, and where a million gay love stories were written and lived. San Francisco is familiar in a way that New York will never be. I knew the city before I knew the stories, and that’s what makes them so special to me.

What is better than writing alone in half familiar bedrooms, listening to Sufjan Stevens, and watching the sun rise. I am fine, in all the best senses of the word.

1 February, 2012

My aunt told me over dinner tonight, the story of a caterpillar in the arctic that continually freezes and thaws over three years until it finally becomes a moth, mates, and dies. I can’t stop thinking about it. She is a devout christian – a missionary, actually – and therefore a creationist, and thought it was the most amazing organism in nature. But my first thought was “Jesus christ, if this doesn’t make me an existentialist, what will?” Can you imagine literally living and freezing and reawakening for a few weeks in the spring, just to die? Sometimes I am so profoundly grateful and happy to just be human. To be a person, an entity with thoughts and feelings and like, empathy.

5 April, 2012

It’s been a long time since I’ve written with a flashlight in the dark – it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything at all, actually. But tonight, at 4am, with my heart beating so fast it could burst — this feels like the right time to start hoping again.

I looked at all those photos of New York City just now, the steeples and riversides and everyday astronauts in skyscrapers. I thought for the millionth time about the immensity of dreams and wonder on that tiny island. And then I looked at photos of _____, and modern art, and realized that in just a few months time, all of this will be within my grasp and mine for the taking. Pretty girls and the giddiness of spring after snow. New lives and weird tears and seeing special faces, weathered faces, familiar places everyday on the subway.

This is already an awakening.