the star to every wandering bark

i'm leaving for europe on tuesday.

and how are you?

i'm actually quite ecstatic because my being away for two weeks means no work and no school for two weeks, which means absolutely all my waking hours for leisure. or at least for myself and not for my boss or my professors.

i think i'm growing up. i'm a great believer in time--i know that if i wait long enough, such and such will happen, i know that if i leave something up to time, it will resolve itself. take for instance the classmate that liked me. i couldn't wait for summer vacation to come so that he would not see me for three months. when we came back, nothing was said of his letters to me and he eventually got himself a girlfriend. there was a time when i really wanted to quit my job, so much so that i was going to tell my boss then and there. but i waited and things got better. but i think i'm really growing up.

i want to be a writer someday. i do, even though i'm sure thousands of other people think they could be writers if they wanted to be. unlike so many others, i'm not so confident in my abilities. i started writing stories when i was 11 years old, but i'd never finished one before. i have hundreds of stories and would-be books that i have never written endings for. indeed, most of them are only four or five or six pages long. but as i grew older and my writing changed, my thinking changed, my stories got longer. two years ago, i finished my first story: it was 10 chapters long and about 30 or 40 pages long. it had a beginning, a middle and an end and i'd like to think that the characters were consistent, the plot even, and the story well-told. now i am working on two more stories and i'm already thinking ahead to when i finish writing them and the editing that will ensue. i've put away childish ways, i'd like to think, and have begun to consider the long-run. but when you're so close to attaining a dream, when you're that much closer to fulfilling something, your fears increase. these two stories are very vulnerable. what with the two week trip and my return to school directly after...i'm so afraid that i'll never write endings for my stories. to have begun them so well but leave them unfinished is something i do not want to do, something i can't allow now that i am grown up. because the ideas are still fresh in my mind and because i feel like i'll never get another chance to finish these stories.

i'm 20 years old. it's time for me to start finishing what i've started.

a lot of people think that when you truly love something, when you truly love somebody, you'd do anything for that love. you'd climb mountains and cross oceans until you've succeeded with that person or thing you loved. but nobody tells you that love that great, love that genuine becomes a part of you and tucks itself away in the sleeves of your heart until you are so certain that it has already been attained, it has already been reciprocated when it really hasn't. you begin to feel that its enough to love that somebody without having to climb those mountains. you begin to feel that its enough to love something without having to cross those oceans because you love it with all your heart. but its not: love is hard-work and sweat and tears and heartache. its taking a beating, and what's more, its getting back up. they don't tell you that its easier to take the beating than get up after it, but getting back up is always harder. when someone is beating you, they are the enemy, you hate them. after the beating is over, you turn on yourself, you are your own enemy, you are ashamed. love is a secret.

and i suppose growing up means learning that those mountains need to be climbed and those oceans crossed. or what else is there?