sleepy afternoon

so the years spin by and now the girl is twenty
though her dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
there’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams and plenty
before the last revolving year is through
I'm really emotional today. Not just because of the turning twenty thing, either. It's coupled with the change of weather, the packing, the gifts, the people.

Since I finished writing in the journal that Victoria gave me for Christmas awhile back, I've stopped writing in real journals and instead writing more emails, with even more random thoughts than usual. I regret not recording the gap between then and now in one spot, in a notebook or somewhere, because so much has passed and changed, inevitably, but so much more than is obvious through a retelling of plot or even a recollection of feeling.

It hasn't happened too often recently, but beginning in January or so I began waking up in the mornings really uncertain and anxious--of what, I'm not entirely sure. Of my future, that vagueness that has never much plagued me before. Of myself, something I've alternately given too little thought and too much. Of what it is that I want to give to and receive from life, things I've always seemed sure of, at least in retrospect and at the very least in the abstract. If even the concept has blurred, what kind of concrete does that leave me to walk on?

Remember Big Fish last semester? Sometimes I worry that the world is the big fish and I'm the too small ocean.

Nothing is better than listening to music that has been personalized, through experience, memory or character. I feel incredibly lucky that I have things like that to list under the "certainty" category. Because by nighttime, I've convinced myself that things will be all right. I still wake up uncertain again the next morning, but I never foresee that during the comfort of nighttime. When I write these things, I feel sure--not blindly optimistic (one of the misperceptions I hate the most). My brother Stephen thinks that sadness is more complex than happiness, the whole idea of all happy families being the same and all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way. But when I think about those mornings versus those nights, I can't imagine anything being more complicated than simple contentment.