empty parking lots, empty pill bottles.

i wish only to grow.

"and so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

it's been a full year.

i'm on new medication that works better, called venlafaxine, and I just got out of a breakup but it was ok. it was that sort of break up that is mutual, kind, or perhaps not mutual, but I'm not to shattered about it. he was a good person but I seem to be getting bored. perhaps I'm just bored of everything in my life, all the perilous little details and detainments that I seem to notice above all else.

I play the guitar, but I've been slacking in practicing lately, returning to that familiar state of sweat and paint as I pour over my Art III projects at 8 o'clock in the morning. there is always something to pull me away from the task at hand, it seems-- always something rattling on inside my mind, always something drifting into my eyeing. my heartbeat seems to take up a significant amount of my attention lately. 

I should read more. I'm trying to become every bit the person I want to be, that I imagine myself as. alas, trying to push yourself upon a glow-up is a difficult thing to do. 

I want to go on an exchange year. I am studying French in and out of school in hopes of going to France or somewhere that speaks the language, but I am loosing an attention for it rapidly. this ambition that is growing inside me is greater than books and small words on a page, greater than all these little phrases I must translate. no. I feel my body is much too small for my dreams, these things that I want.

how much have I changed, I wonder, since I last sat down and thought about who I am, what I consider to be myself. I am small and yet, inside, I am deeply attached to this person I used to be. who I was before it all. nowadays, I look around, and I am much bigger, much greater, but still I cannot feel that same joy. I am getting there, perhaps, but getting there proves a larger task than people let on.

so I will let myself fade into the summertime and absorb the heat and sun. I will let myself grow in the heat, and not rush, and watch the sunset tonight, laptop closed on the seat beside me.