Nothing but roots.

I’ve been going through a lot of my old writing recently, something I’m apt to do when faced with a big life transition. I tend to return to previous periods of evolution, searching for guidance on how to feel, how to react. It’s been an odd experience, to pour through years of writing and suddenly notice how the dreams I had once crafted with striking detail now seem so absent from my life. 

Growing up I always thought that I would live with a pen tucked behind my ear, a life on the run. I thought I would live in a perpetual state of travel and transition, a life of total impermanence, traversing languages and time zones and existing without an address. I imagined that love would come in waves, break with the current, and get washed out to shore. I never thought or expected that love would be my sun, a star around which my entire life revolved. 

I used to write about so many things, about the cities I would conquer with my words and the bodies I would break beneath me. I had so much passion, I thought it would scorch everything and everyone around me, destroy all of my relationships.

Yet here I am. I look back and notice how the practicality of reality has weighed on my decisions. Boxes packed around me, on the cusp of a brand new life. 

Since moving out of my family’s house, I haven’t decorated anywhere that I’ve lived or anywhere that I’ve worked. My reasoning was always that this apartment, this desk, this space was transient - I would exist here for a certain period of time, and then I would move on. This was also the case in some of the flings I had while in an open relationship: I always saw the expiration date. What was the point in investing my money, my time, my energy, my love in anything that I knew would inevitably end? 

This next move is different, though; there is no end date. And it’s strange, because I’ve spent my entire life thinking about my next move, about the future that existed right around the corner, and I feel very removed from that line of thinking now. While I’ve had to bury a few dreams to get to this point, I now have nothing but roots to dig into the ground.