I dreamt last night that you came to me in a warehouse of a home, of big open spaces and oversized hearths where the birds lived in with us and the trees grew from the floor within corrugated metal walls and rough-hewn oak tables. You came to me with three bracelets of bronze, gold, and silver stamped with messages, only one I recall. "3 yrs" it said, like a promise. "Three years," you said, with a beaming, and genuine smile in your face. By a grand hearth of stone wreathed in a garland of winter greens, lit by the glow of a large fire we cant feel, we stand. "Three years?" My heart swelling, relief flooding though I didn't understand. A face I haven't seen and a voice I haven't heard in longer than I care to think. "Three years we've been together." Your eyes soften and I still don't understand because we haven't been together, we've been apart exactly that long and my mind races as I search for something I've missed. The truth I land on is that I am with someone that isn't you and guilt shades my face. Not guilt for you, but shame that I am the world to someone else that I don't love as deeply as I feel you. Tears come in torrents and are made more painful for the love I've allowed recognition and release. I rush into your arms in equal parts fear and jubilance. The truth that I settle into your arms with, the truth in the familiarity and rightness of you and your name and your love, the truth that I surrender to is that it is you, it always has been you, and it always will be you. My heart tears in my chest and my throat shrivels, my breath is sand and my mouth hangs wide as I remember what I have to say to someone now behind my present. As ever, I weight the scales in my mind with what is good and what is bad, even as you whisper through my hair and into my brain "I've waited for this, I thought I could never come back" - words I practiced in my mirror at home, in my car, in my mind as I worked all the days I was not with you. The scales creak and groan and screech their protests, the one man against the other, and my heavy, tired, sluggish heart is turning to sludge, and somewhere in the hollow of my spirit that we call 'soul', a stirring is felt and my mind bends to the stir. I feel it. The calculations and the weights don't matter, the past and the present don't matter, and the feeling and the fear don't matter. My body slumps down into your arms and I say "I am yours at last. The truth against everything is...I can't be without you again". And as with each morning, I wake, short of breath and full of fear that turns to sadness as reality seeps sleepily into view, crushing my heart. drama.

I have to go back to the beginning. They ask me "What do you want to do?" They stare at me. They wait. They think I'm wishy washy. I am. Is the truth the worst assumption someone can make about you? I am young, and I am passionate. I am practical. I am impatient. These are my flaws. And the reason I hesitate when I hear "What do you want to do?" or "Where do you want to be in 5 years?" The truth may be the worst assumption you can make about me. Honestly? I want to be married to the love of my life (where ARE you?). I want to be financially stable enough to be thinking about children. I want to be happy. Do I have to be a designer? No. I think all I have to be is a creator. Of something. I have bitterness and resentment in my heart that I need to let go of. Both old and new. It lies like a stone in my chest, the weight of it growing heavier each day. I have become jaded, cynical, and increasingly dissatisfied as the years have gone by.

It has been a whiile. There is a house. With a little blue door. And it sits in a wheat field in the early dew of a fall morning. Insects, aglow with the morning light, drift lazily about like motes of dust in an ancient library. This house was built by hands; the kind of hands that belong to a self-made man who dreamt it, built it, lived in it, loved in it, and left it behind. It is a simple, country-style house built in a time gone without machines or shortcuts. Stunningly back-lit by a brilliant dawn, I see the sunlight shoot through smudge windows of the house from back porch to front. The whitewashed clapboard pleasantly peels a bit around the edges, from age or disuse, inviting my hands to come and care for it. To restore it. The empty rooms sweetly ask for purpose and objects and people and feelings to fill up its spaces. I am filled by the bittersweet and melancholic yearning of the house that is not a home and it is me searching for purpose and me needing to be fulfilled and me reaching out and filling the head of a stranger with possibilities and plans. It is me calling out, swathed in glorious morning sunlight, a beaming beacon of hope and promise for the future. Memories of past inhabitants and failed little attempts at home begun within me, in the heart of me, that were abandoned not quickly enough though I yearned for what they represented. For what I could represent. I am saying "please" and laying myself bare. Look to me.

Great change came and it went, with a much-a-do hullaboo about it. I moved. The most difficult and financially draining process of my life. Emotionally exhausted, I moved in to a studio further into Queens and have found it surprisingly lovely. The neighborhood is nice, the commute is quick and nearly painless. I am close to everything I need.

Still haven't gotten a better job, but I'm working on that - well, will be working on that now that I have some free time again. When I say some free time, I mean very little of it.

Love is difficult. As always. This is somehow (I know how) worse than ever before. Let's be more honest than usual and still not as honest as 'completely honest' and say that I am not happy and I once again feel stuck in a situation that doesn't seem to be getting any better no matter what I try to do. I'm at the point now where I just want to grab someone by the collar and scream at the top of my lungs all the things I want to say, but dont (because nice people don't say things like those). It's incredible how people can ask one thing or another of you and not take their own advice into account.

I need to get my priorities straight. If I'd had them straight to begin with I might not have moved to new york in the first place. I don't think I've ever said "first things first" to myself, so maybe that's part of my problem. Following my gut when my gut is wrong.

I have realized that this blog is really just a place for me to house my latent negativity. I'm glad I don't push this on to other people. At least I don't think I do.

Well, I am pushing it onto anyone who happens to read this. Which I'm positive is no one. Which is probably for the best.

How did I fuck things up this much? The weight of everything is making me literally sick to my stomach. I came up here to build a life, without a clear plan for my future, hoping to fly by the seat of my pants as I always have and hoping for success to come my way. But money and love and lethargy barred my way.

And now I am once again on the precipice of great change. There are a couple of ways this could all play out.

A week or so ago I was so sure - I thought I had convinced myself I knew what I wanted - and now here I am wondering what I should do. Again.

What is there here for me? What can I feasibly afford to do?

What do I really want?

What is going to fulfill me?

When am I going to stop being indecisive?