Wind Changes.

It was a year of wind-changes. I woke like a bird at dawn every day, rustling my feathers, wondering where the light would fall.

I kept trying to catch and capture my identity even as it was stripped from me. Burrowed in. Burrowed out. Called myself new names.

I split each day between sleep and slough. I'd lost my sense of wonder, and it came back the more I craned my neck. It came back the more sweet things I ate, the more songs I tried to sing in languages I didn't know, the more narrow cobble I climbed.

The year ahead is already halved and quartered. Hard work, hustle, New York. Then on - maybe Alaska, New Hampshire, Iowa.

I flick my eyelids up and down. I tell myself to be better. I delete the numbers I shouldn't call. I pack away the poems I shouldn't read. I'll get small and strong, I'll get more honest. I'll get less selfish. 

If someone were to ask what I wanted, I'd tell them first about the dream I had that I knew was from God: the one where I woke up knowing where to go and how to get there.

Then I'd tell them after that! 

I'd tell them: Life's been pick-pocketing me, but I don't mind.

On the first day of January, we drove away from the mountains drunk on muscadine wine. I stretched my mouth and curled my fingers - hands to the wheel, eyes narrowed against the dark, moving forward with all the fear and courage of the present and the past.

St. Louis.

I'll have so much to tell you about someday.

North Country Fair.

(Dan. Beacon, NY)

I went for coffee but couldn't find a seat. My eyelashes stuck together from old mascara and from the cold. I stood in the bathroom, waiting for a table to open, and shifted from foot to foot, holding the tips of my fingers underneath warm water. In church, I wept with my eyes wide open and my head in my hands; watching my tears hit the wooden floor of the back pew. From the alter, a young girl pleaded: "God, why do you allow such things to happen?"

On Thursday, Dan and I met on Ridgewood Avenue at 11:45. I got a too-big tattoo to match his: laughing at our impulsive need to document ourselves to our ourselves.

The week was pure shit. But walking home in my Michigan hat, head bent low against the wind, there was nothing left to do but laugh, count the change in my pocket, and climb the stairs to bed.

Back in Brooklyn.

I made this rule in the midst of some short-lived breakup with Z that I could never date another boy who slept in a mattress on the floor. It seemed to say so much about the priorities and stability of a person's life. Now I sleep in a mattress on the floor and it's the most settled I've been in over a year.

I guess that's what I've learned about rules.

22.

4:50am and I sat on a suitcase in the driveway, feeling prematurely tender towards the cool mist, the low-blinking buildings, the creaking backdoor I spent four months swinging through. The cab to the bus to the airplane all came and went before sunrise, and I hardly noticed any of it. I felt a giddy, quiet sense of freedom, like I was sneaking out the door after a one-night stand.

I turned twenty-two the next day, sitting in a Waffle House in my hometown. It was 12:15, and all I could do was try to keep my eyes open.

I think back over the year, and have to laugh at all the hair-brained scheming, and the skin-of-my-teeth adventures. I've never felt such intense emotions, never cried so much, never wondered at the world with such depth.

All in all, I'm writing it off as a success. I visited four countries, lived in five different cities, made a handful of new friends that I'll cherish for years to come. I feel more at ease in my own skin, and more comfortable with living in uncertainty.

People have been asking what I'll do next and the answer is so simple: All of it.

Past the Feeling.

(L'Abri, photograph by Christena Dowsett)

Cornered by a spot of sunlight, / I sat on the back porch  / listing words that made me feel simultaneously / dead and alive.

"Breath-
blown, sun-choked,
tree-torn."

Oogum Boogum.

I hesitate to call any day in Ann Arbor "good," because even in peaceful moments, I feel a deeper sadness. But it was green and yellow. It was the kind of day I spent reminding myself to inhale fully, to reserve an hour to sit in the sunshine. I know in a few months I'll miss the warmth, and regret not making the time for any heat.

I watched Blue Is The Warmest Colour in the late afternoon, smothered with light from the window by my bed. What I loved most was the physicality of Adele. She eats voraciously, with no sense of shame at her own hunger -- no need for daintiness. She fucks, she dances, she blubbers messy, snotty tears... all her sensuality and allure derives from how in her body she is.

I'm through with apologising for myself. When I'm hungry, I'll eat. No more hospital IV's, no more meetings with nutritionists after class. When I'm in love, I'll say so. No more climbing through the bedroom window when the front door is unlocked.

Last weekend, Dan and I danced barefoot in Andrew's back yard. It was the first time I'd felt like myself in months. The rest of the party stayed standing in a cluster on the concrete, snide and self-assured. I didn't care. Why deny wet grass, Duke Ellington, the glow of the porch light, the sheen of the picket fence?

I clenched and unclenched my toes against the dirt. I thought: I'd rather die than get that old and quiet inside -- like an empty room.