Whenever I hear the trite phrase "home is where the heart is," I kind of laugh to myself and think about how Round Lake is a place I can't wait to move away from for good. But as I flew over Chicago today on my approach to O'Hare, I realized that home is not just the place you park your car, the town you live in, where you buy groceries, and fall asleep at night. Home is a state of mind. 

Home is me stretching across the woman sitting next to me's lap to see the skyline, something I missed a lot over the past five days. Home is walking to the fridge and seeing that we have water in pitchers, and thankfully pouring myself an ice cold glass of water. Home is knowing that in the end, things will probably work out. 

Home, to me is something I cannot wait to establish. Home is something that I will only find in Chicago. Maybe it's because it is the only place I have come to know, but I truly cannot see myself anywhere else but here.

I find myself visiting new places and seeing aesthetics I hope to one day include in the place I come home to at the end of the day. I see people and things and I cannot wait to have a part of that, however big or small it is. I see a color and know that that exact color is what I want painted on my bathroom walls. I see a man lovingly look at a woman and know that I want something like that. I see a cookbook and think about the thousands of other books I own and think about if I would like built in bookshelves. Am I thinking too far in the future? Absolutely not, because right along with thinking of my preferences of linoleum or wood floors, I'm not thinking of the floor I'm about to spill my drink on. I'm not thinking about how nice the fridge I'm opening is (how it has the freezer on one side and the fridge on the other, something I've always wanted), I'm more focused on the fact that there has got to be another frozen pizza in there somewhere. I'm not fixated on the grill my burger is currently cooking on and how it is built into the deck, I'm just wondering where the ketchup is. 

So while I'm busy living my life, I occasionally wonder when it's going to get started.. but oh wait, it already has.

things i will not say out loud

-Sometimes when I go somewhere, I want to never come back. Take Boston, for example. A part of me wants to bring everything meaningful with me out there and not come back. I'd live by the ocean and in a beautiful city and probably learn a lot about myself while I started over. And then I realize that everything meaningful to me will never fit inside a suitcase, or even a car. I couldn't pack Dexter nights on the couch with my dad into the suitcase, nor would going grocery shopping with my mom fit. My friends wouldn't be able to drop their lives and follow me to the east coast, so really I'd be leaving behind everything meaningful. The buses idling on Fell Street at 5am every day, avoiding stoplights on the back roads with knowledge that only comes from spending many years in one place. The more I think about it, I'll be coming back willingly.

-I'm tired of giving out endless amounts of advice to people who do absolutely nothing with it. I can't count the times in the past six months I've listened to someone talk about how awful things have been going with their lives, and gave them my whole, honest opinion of what I would do. Almost every single one of those occasions has been met with "Don't be mad, but I (insert contraction to whatever advice was given)." So this is me being done. I will not answer when you call me at an obscure hour to hear the same thing I've been hearing. This from the people who were less than willing to hear me out when I needed an ear. 

- I'm really liking the idea of the we pronoun. More and more lately I've been thinking about it and, to be as vague and subtle as possible, I love the concept of being a part of something. More than anything, I want to have something static in the hecticness of the world. I want to look forward to what "we" will do together. Vacations, movies, nights out, and staying in. I love being a part of a constant group of friends, or a constant companion. I want to wake up next to someone I can depend on to be there for me. After a year of trivial relationships and setting my expectations low, I can say that I've been ready to be mature about things.

twenty

I think about turing 20 as a completely irrelevant and useless age. Sure, you're not a teenager anymore, but you stop associating with being a teenager when you become an adult at 18. You're not 21 yet, which is truly the most important age in sight to most of us. Something about 20 gets me though. Maybe it's the fact that some of us never got to turn 20. Yesterday would have been Mike's 20th birthday. Twenty is probably a big deal to a mom who doesn't have her only son anymore. Twenty is a bigger deal to her than it is to any person actually turning twenty.

favorite state of mind

My favorite place to be varies, depending on my mood. At times, it's in front of a treadmill display, watching the timer go from 39:59 to 40:00, or another notable milestone on my workout. Other days, it's anywhere I can spread a towel across the sand and bake my skin for a few hours. A lot of the time, it's anywhere within the Bloomington-Normal city limits, when I have everyone I could possibly want within walking distance or a phone call away. My bed ranks high up on the list, but never as high as possible because sometimes it feels like it's too big for just me. Other times, it's Michigan Avenue, right as you're approaching it about to walk up to Millennium Park. But really, truly, my favorite place is thousands of miles away. 

My favorite place is somewhere between the top of the Acropolis, where you can see all of Athens, the Aegean sea, and probably the Mediterranean if you look hard enough. Between a cobblestone street running through the Plaka, fending off calls of 'Kalimera, tikanis?' from shopkeepers and trying not to get trampled by flocks of tour groups. It's somewhere between the center of the city at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider, and about an hour outside the city on the pebble beaches of Glifada. 

At times, especially recently, I find myself completely and absolutely overwhelmed. Rather than just relaxing, I let my thoughts drive me into a less-than-pleasant place, and spend afternoons worrying over something irrelevant. I simply need to teach myself that whatever happens, will happen. I need to find myself standing on top of the Acropolis and feel the wind blowing through my hair on an eighty degree day and realize that there is a lot more to life than hating my jobs, overthinking, and worrying about whether or not I'll get enough sleep tonight. Maybe not that there's more to life than all that, but maybe to just slow things down for once. Focus on the good things and soon anything negative will push itself out of focus. I inhale and try to picture what that day looked like two whole years ago. There is a little bit of smog over the city, and you can see the Mediterranean Sea through some of the mountains. It is really hot out, at least eighty-five degrees now with no shade. We timed our trip to the Parthenon poorly, since it is a Saturday and high noon. I try to pick out the ship we'll be sailing on the next day, but there are too many boats going through the port to focus on just one. My mom is trying to drag me towards some sort of photo opportunity, and I wonder just how many pictures I can take up here before I fill my camera card up halfway into our trip. I just want to preserve this moment forever.

Preserve this moment forever so that two years later when I find myself about to cry from being overtired, overworked and underappreciated, I can bring myself back to that exact moment in time and feel calm. I close my eyes for a few minutes and think about how it felt above that city to have the wind whirling around me, the sun beating down, and history rising up from the cracks in the architecture. When I open my eyes again, I don't even remember what was troubling me before, and all of the sleep I've missed in the past few days is irrelevant. 

It's like my worries are nothing when I am in my favorite place- physically or mentally, and that is exactly where my favorite state of mind rests.

paint.

I find myself sitting in the room where all of my paints, brushes and anything else art-related is stored. As I roll out a piece of wax paper to begin mixing paint on, I can't help but feel like one thing I truly love never really cared for me back. Art was my passion. Upon nearing my high school graduation, I figured that I could take my passion and turn it into a career. I busted my ass putting together a portfolio, meeting with professors, and staying after school to keep making things. All summer I could hardly think of anything but all the art classes I would be taking. By the second week of the semester, I loved my art history class more than I could imagine and was completely obsessed with my 3-D Design class. But have you ever felt like you were giving your best to something only to fail miserably at it? I feel that way about 2-D, a class I needed a C in order to continue being an art major. I fucking cried over that class, tried to email my professor and spent hours in the CVA trying to understand the assignments we were given. For the first time in my life, I felt like a blind person trying to read letters off a page. For the first time in my life, I felt like something I had once loved so much didn't love me back. It was as though I was in a bad relationship, spiraling downwards and I was holding on for the ride. I dreaded going to my art classes and I no longer felt excited to start new projects. The night I officially switched myself out of my second semester art classes and regressed to being an undecided major, I sat down with a 24"x36" canvas and a photograph of a church I took in Greece. I stayed up until I was completely finished with the painting, and at 4am I realized that I didn't need to turn my passion into my job for me to truly love it. I didn't need a grade to tell me that I had some form of talent. So here I am on a random summer morning when I should have probably gone back to sleep, about to mix paint for the first time in a while. Every time my mom has people over, she points out the painting above the fireplace and tells people about how I painted it for her. She doesn't mention the first D I ever received, or all of the projects I keep hidden in the guest bedroom & I don't mention the fact that I lost touch of something I really loved for an entire semester. Love is a funny thing. It has the ability to disguise itself, make you doubt it's not there, but when there's paint loaded up on a brush, I know that the love is there.

transitions

It's funny how I can go from having one of the best weekends ever to feeling so, so low. Really, it's quite simple. All it takes is me driving far away from about 60% of the things that hold relevance and meaning to me (The other 40%- my family, the tcd, my bed at home, and the dv-r- are still important, however). I drive away from the place I've lived the past nine amazing months at, my close friends, and familiarity for utter boredom back home- so surprisingly, I'm not too happy. Mix in about all of Illinois' licensed drivers who have no idea that the left lane is for passing and not driving in tandem next to the slow moving farm equipment in the right lane. Factor in the fact that when I got home, all I could focus on was how my throat was killing me and I was exhausted. I could barely leave out enough details when I recapped my weekend with my mom so that she would not know I spent 3am on Saturday night chugging Lunch Boxes and rolling around in the backseat of a cab. Exhausting. And then, I found myself in bed, unable to fall asleep, not so different from the past two weeks. There's something about laying next to someone you care about and not sleeping because you're busy talking in comparison to laying in your bed by yourself, restless. And amazingly, I somehow managed to drag myself over to the pool to dip myself in chlorine with ninos for two hours. I ran like hell out of there to bake myself in the sun for the remaining hours of my day and even that felt like un-quality time. The rest of the afternoon was unproductive up until Derrik and I spent a good two hours on the phone plotting our lives in general. I cried at some point, laughed my ass off, and knee drove my way to work. Within an hour of working at Forever, my feet and shoulders started hurting while I dragged around a cart of run-backs. I realized that retail customers are possibly the rudest people in the world, and I couldn't understand why after someone tried clothes on, they would possibly see it fitting to ball the garment up in the corner of the fitting room rather than just fucking hanging it on the hanger. A whole hour and a half after Gurnee Mills closed its doors to all of the quality customers who shop there, Forever 21 was finally restored back to its original splendor- a somewhat disorganized chaos. One would think that when a mall parking lot is empty, it would be easy to remember where you parked, but this is not the case. After finding my car and subjecting myself to listen to downer music to continue my mood of being pissed off, I made my way home to where I am right now: cranky and not looking forward to my life this week. The most important thing I learned today is that I need to start creating occasions for all of the clothes I buy, and that I will never live in Round Lake for a long period of time again. That is fucking all.

It's been a good two weeks since I've been able to write anything notable. I hate that I have so much to say but I can't seem to get it all out there. I want so much to put it all into words, but yet I'm holding back. I'm holding back because it is probably too early to start making assumptions and ideas. It's too soon to start putting my thoughts into motion when I want so badly to do just that.
I pride myself on being honest to people, but I feel like the first person I need to really be honest with is myself. I find myself saying that I hate how insecure I am, how harshly I take things, and how much I over think. If someone came to me and told me those things, I could think of a bunch of ways to change that, yet I'm the worst person to help myself.
I believe in exceptions to how someone is behaving. I believe in routines, that if I do something a certain way, then this result will happen. 

It's frustrating.

What's more frustrating is that I cannot get what I want to say out of this mess of words

I hate that I have so much to say but I can't seem to get it all written down. I want so much to put it all into words, but yet I'm holding back. I'm holding back because it is too early to start making assumptions and ideas. It's too soon to start putting my thoughts into motion when I want so badly to do just that.

Is it ever too early?