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....