"Here you go" and her hair is locked in a braid. Her eyes are large, brown and open and gleaming as she gives me a candy. Those kinds of candy that only children could like since they're so sweet and pasty and I'll probably put it in my pocket and leave it there and never eat it but it's just that her eyes are so open, so gleaming and everything grew that much vivid, that much real because how long has it been since I've wondered at something? And I pushed that thought out of my head and only gave her the warmest smile I could muster and saw her tiny, sun-kissed hand place the cheap treat into my larger, pale as a death one and I never saw a more authentic portrait of my reality until that moment. I really have to wake up now.

My therapist says I'm a walking contradiction and I am. I wasn't always this sad. Just a little nostalgic, as a kid I sighed too much at the twilight blanketing the suburbs or looked too much out the window but it was healthy, it was just that romanticism of feeling how frail things were even if I was too young to understand it. But I still had energy. I still lived. I still felt things as they were, I talked very much, and my voice was louder, and I had no shame, no desire to hide myself like I do now. That's why. Now all my personality is my depression, that's all that exists, and sometimes it's hard to remember that this isn't me. It's not. I never was one to want to stay at home all day. I would rush my
friends to go out. I would want to meet strangers and I wanted to be busy and bustling and full of prospects and now those things scare me to death and I feel tired all the time and this isn't me. As I am right now, it isn't me. And lots of people say "you've changed it's okay, people change" and I don't believe that, because we are what we have been shaped to be in those few first years of life and though we can try on different skins and step onto different shoes we are that essence, deep down. And the people we've loved we'll never stop loving, and the things we wanted deep down, we'll never stop wanting. And I know that I'm sick. And I've had enough. I don't want to be sick anymore, I don't want it to consume me anymore. I want to be myself again. I don't want to do what's comfortable, what's safe, what's recommended. I want to live, and really live. I live when I work, I swear that I do, because being around that much growth is a sort of fountain of youth. And I want to feel like that all the time. Not just pretending to be happy because that's what teaching's about. No. I want to be really happy. I want to be healthy on my own, not with the help of some drug or prescription. I want to feel good about myself without looking for other's validation and when someone calls me beautiful really believe it about myself, not just because someone else called me it.

And it's going to be hard and painful and it's going to suck but it's worth it. Iceland and looking at sunsets out plane windows, watching a kid's face light up when they say a word correctly, reading a book I've never read before, actually writing something worth reading, walking through a desert street in Tokyo, singing along to foreign guitars and dusty pianos, kissing a girl in a street without feeling insecure, being with someone and not worrying about how they see me but just being in the moment, not looking for warmth in random people's beds but in my own (which isn't bad at all, just my reason for it sucks), it's all worth it.

When I feel the bony grasp of the icelandic winds clutch my cheeks in its hard grasp while I gaze into a steel-blue Látrabjarg sea and feel my soul physically move with the birds gliding above me, when I wake up with someone's hair sprawled on a crisp white pillow and see their lofty, sleepy faces when no one else can, it'll be worth it. It's worth it. Japan is worth it, the film I still have to burn is worth it, the characters I have to make up are worth it, she's worth it, whoever she is. My future will be worth it.