Maybe it's home.

I dreamt about the metro again last night.

There's something about the underground that seems to work so well metaphorically. All those trains, running underneath your feet, everyone going somewhere, a spiderweb network of orange and blue and green. I certainly dream about it often.

This is one of my dreams. Not the one from last night...a dream far more frightening and far more memorable. If I've already told you about it, never mind reading the rest.

I'm on the metro, at the back of one of those cars with white seats and orange walls in the front and the back, the ones you don't see as much anymore. The wall I'm against doesn't have a door in it -- it's the very end of the train. By the dim lights I can see a few other people in the car, each of them sitting on their own...reading their newspapers, or simply staring into space. And the train rattles on and on into the darkness. It doesn't stop, and it doesn't slow down.

I don't know where it's going.

I'm not giving up, ever. I swear it.

This girl is not me, but I love her.

It was windy. Warm breezes played through her hair and around her ankles. She was a wind person, as much as Corey was a creature of the waves and water and Liam a forest dweller. Air was freedom and invisibility married. Yet just as an anonymous writer may shake the world through pivotal prose, the impact of air and wind is often monumental – waves on the ocean, trees blown over, landscapes eroded over time. She laughed to herself at that thought. Air held sway, of a sort, over all the elements of the ancient world. Fire mocks and destroys while water seduces and smothers, but lowly, invisible air has power unparalleled.

She held her arms out on either side, embracing the world. Her feet seemed ready to float off the ground. Flying would be easy, she thought. All you had to do was let go. Freedom was something to be attained, a conscious choice to leave everything behind, a sense of peace with oneself and with the world. Freedom was a blind man who opened his eyes for the very first time, and was speechless with wonder.

I am, she whispered. I am here.

Upon rereading....

Sorry about the ranting, guys. I want to make clear that I think my life is awesome. It's just time I did something worthwhile instead of sitting around and mooching off my parents. I'm not an emoblogger, right?

I know it's beside the sea.

I've been privileged enough to have a wonderful, supportive family, an idyllic childhood, fantastic friends, and a constant supply of life's essentials such as food, water, and music. I have laughed and I have made it through darker times. I have been shunned and praised, I have known death and birth (although death, like most other negative aspects of a person's life, has not affected me as much as it has others around me. For this as well I am fortunate).

Haven't I been happy the past two-point-something years of high school? I would have been happier at no other school and with no other friends. And one summer after the next have I spent sitting on the ledge outside Mini-Cout, idly watching people pass me by, content with the world.

I have so many memories. I'm lucky, extremely lucky.

I want out.

It's time I left. I don't belong here any more, if I ever did. I love Montreal West and I love my family, but I have to go. If we all, at some point, have an instinctive urge to leave the next, I've been suppressing mine for a long time. The world is so big that it makes very little sense to me why anyone would be happier living a sedentary life. Youth in its entirety, the way I see it, is a time for jumping from place to place with limited finances -- I'm not talking about overpriced cruises -- and no direction in mind.

I suppose my nomadic tendencies could be pretty easily explained. Point to my mother's last name, then open the encyclopedia to the entry on pastoral nomadism in Asia. See? It's historical, it's cultural, it's the fault of genetics! Yet another thing to blame on ancestry, yippee. (Missed the last one?)

Let's make something clear, though. I'm not necessarily planning on moving around forever. That doesn't appeal to me either. There's so much to see, but I know that I only have to find the perfect place...absolutely the perfect place...to give up globetrotting and (a shudder rips through my body as I type these two words) settle down.

So where's the perfect place? I don't even know whether it exists. If it does, who's to say whether it can be found on this world? There are a lot of places in the world, but there are a lot of people too, and I somehow doubt the presence of a perfect place for everyone who has ever lived and ever will.

Am I setting myself up for a disappointment? Maybe. Settling down is very distant at this moment, my first priority being leaving. I'm going to finish high school and decide what the fuck to do about piano. (Not a very portable instrument, but I don't want to give it up. Bit of a problem.) Then...who can say? But I'm young, and I'm abnormal, and I want to see the world, and I want to find my place.

I want my freedom.

Now, if only I could travel in time....

Pretentious? Never.

The Part of You That No One Sees

You are aloof, mysterious, and distant. People feel like they really don't know the true you... Yet they're still drawn to you, almost by magnetic force. Underneath it all, you don't even really feel like you know yourself. It's easier to put on a front than really think about your life's purpose. You tend to seem pretentious, but it's just a mechanism you use to push people away.

Sorry for no posts again.

To put it bluntly, we're hooked.

How long is it before copies of The Old Man and the Sea include a definition for marlin?

Well, I don't really have time/motivation to write a proper post, so I'll just continue posting links. Check out a life-size blue whale: http://www.stopbloodywhaling.org/media/flash/whalebanner/content_en.html

I, uh, like whales.

Turn off all the lights.

I've had a very soft spot for these birds ever since my mother thought she saw one several years ago. Wikipedia seems hopeful that they're still around, and so does this site.

This public speaking business has made me crazy. A little longer and I'll be charting whale species again.

Durrr.

Merry Anniversary, RFS.

I'm a little late...my first post was April 3rd, 2006. It's hard to believe, really....

Why no blogs?

Well, it's definetly not because I've been too busy reading articles about the life expectancy of ipods. It's also not because I've been thinking about my public speaking (I finally picked a topic, and if you've read a certain notorious RFS post you won't be surprised).

Seriously, though, I hope to be back soon.

It'll be so much better on the other side.

Kahverengi

I like coffee. And why not? After all, the Turks like coffee so much that the word for brown translates literally as coffee-coloured.

Gotta go. Dinner.