Picture above taken in Yellowstone National Park by Annette Marie Toomer. She's a badass photographer.

I was going through some of these old pictures and was struck again by how different I feel now than I felt when the pictures were taken. I remember that I felt this sense of being on the edge of something great, but I also remember dreading the year for apparently no reason. It's conflicting I know. But when I came home, I was so damn ecstatic to be back, baby, and I went up to my room and looked through my pictures and felt like it just couldn't get much better. There isn't much that I can think of that's better than being reunited.

So smells are very connected to memory--these geysers had a very distinctive, rotting-egg smell, and even just looking at the picture brought back that smell, and then that feeling, I don't even know who I was at that time. I feel really removed from that right now.

God, this year.

What have I been doing?

I felt like my life was slowly expanding, reaching some point, and now it feels like it's closing in on itself, shrinking. How is that so? I'm 22 years old. I feel old. I'm not spending a lot of time alone or anything. I have a lot of friends. But right now, I feel like life, like college, is something I've done and I don't know what else there is. I'm disoriented. This year has not gone according to my plans. I guess I'll learn to not make plans.

Sorry if I sound down. It's getting darker earlier.

"To crave and to have

are as like as a thing and its shadow...When do out senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing--the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."

-Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

"We came for salvation.

We came for family.

We came for all that's good,

That's how we'll walk away."

-"Salvation Song," The Avett Brothers

The house gets quiet at night,

The leaves fall from the oak tree outside,

Spreading themselves over the front yard.

It’s autumn, the seasons have kept changing,

Can you see it?

The food and books and plants take up space,

The silverware in the kitchen is nestled together,

Waiting in drawers,

The house is resting, sighing and groaning as it takes up space.

But it’s not the same kind of space,

The moving, talking, touching kind of space.

The laughing kind of space,

The space that has hands and lips,

The kind of space that plays guitar badly,

That sings off key on the porch.

The space that rearranges me,

The space that moves me up,

And over to this side of the bed.

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart's hard turning, the heart's slow learning where to love and whom."

-Annie Dillard

I'm happy to be into November just so that I can get October off my back and out of my system.

I'm picturing November as a month of comfort, laughter, sweatpants, turkey, putting things back together some more. That's all I can ask for right now.

But still, sometimes no matter how badly you want to turn a page and just be happy, it isn't time yet. Ugh.