A wallet from your childhood.

A saturday like today - nah, there couldn't be one. I got lonely just now, but for good reason. I feel like I'm always searching... and I guess I like that. There's something I just can't seem to find, like that piece of food that fell off your plate and rolled under the table, yet no matter how hard you look you can't find it. But it was your only meatball, and you're more than willing to wash it off and put it back.

Not so much, actually. More like I'm looking for somebody to be in love with that will fill up my randomly vacanted heartplace. I am a busy guy, and sometimes I even feel like I've grown up some - and then I'll have a Saturday like today when I'm reminded of feelings, ideals, sights and tastes and warmths and laughs and giddies I once experienced, ideals I once led a life to pursue. Do I have those same ideals? Am I actually that same person I watch crossing the screen of my computer, as I sit here in my third (and final!) year of Santa Cruz...what happened in such a small chunk of life, where did I go? When did that past reality allow itself to scoot out of the way and into some hazy sorts of wishful memories, to make way for this new version of a softer, faster thing?

Wait. I'm leaving here very soon. The posh school life, I will be done with it. And that old self- well I know I need a hearty hearty dose of it all. I need to eat the sun with sandals and bare shoulders again, I need to soar against the hot winds of a heavy mountain dirt, and freeze beneath covers with a cool smile smeared across my worriless face, I need to hold a girl that I love with all my heart without the pain of something deadlined next week; I must cry alone; I must crag up a thick tree of towers; I must remember what it is to love somebody. I wish I could have that freedom forever from now on. I I I I I.


To love somebody. Can I do it? Some BODY. Not Love something, or just Love, but love Somebody. Another person. Another face and mind and set of daily routines. Can I do it? I want to try now. I do.

This has been a lot of work here, almost too much. But I'm still alive and powering down some paths to some same place every last day.

Saturdays like today, rare and unwelcome, hop along and revoke my future thru ideals gone passed. It's those gorgeous timelines gone that pull my head up and I can see clearly again. Just one day like today, when I walk into my room and wonder "what just happened?" Looking around, picking up little pieces of mikie left around this room, from a stranger that's been living here for the last months, doing things with my life, dropping little remnants that I get to find the next morning. Who?

I'm driving myself a little mad with that. So I'll leave with this: I used to live for something, a blessed freedom that actually felt possible and out there. No oppressions, no expectations, just the love of freedom and horizons and possibilities. In 2 months, I'm faced with the same opportunity - and all of a sudden, the one thing I look forward to most every day coming out of UCSC, it becomes my greatest oppressor, my looming giant demon of non-escape. For the last 3 years, all's I ever wanted to do was act, as much as possible, as well as possible. For the last 3 months, I've achieved the pinnacle of that desire, and my tunnel-vision has become so extreme and speedy that I lost touch with everything. Shwoosh, shweesh shwahsH! Sliding up a dark tunnel towards a blistering light, blind!
Then SHWAM! suddenly that tunnel cracks on all sides, falls away behind me, I'm still sliding up but suddenly another light fills my eyes, and all that old scenery I once scanned, old faces, feelings of desire, impossible ideals, SHWAAAAAAAAA-CrrraACK! and I'm flooded! My senses drowned, my body quaking with a million tiny hands grasping at my clothes and hair to come back down and be free again. AHH!!

The reality is that I'm not actually stuck doing anything except what I make up to do for myself. I could drop it all, not attempt graduate school, not go to London, not try to act and just go home, like Link once his quest is over, back to his village again to stay.

So maybe I'll do that, find that lovely life once more, and maybe I'll be emptier than ever. I'll get there and in two weeks, maybe two months, I'll be empty again. Right now I'm eating my fuels on a daily basis. It's difficult, it's fast, it's soft, but even so I feel like I'm the slowest of the fast, the hardest of the soft, and possibly the most difficult of us all. I should trust my past self, that the choices I've made and that person who drops little remnants around my room each night is a brilliant-minded crazyboy, who makes incredible choices, who will always be free.

My family is still all with me, my natural love is still as insatiable, my romanticism still unwieldy, my flirty still untamed- all of these things are getting constantly honed and refined, so that what's left is an older, 'wiser', masked version of the-Mikie-that-has-always-been. Last night at the party, last summer in the Glen, last year above Fallen Leaf Lake, three hours ago at Trader Joe's with Angi, four years ago in Financial Aid, it's never been different. It's all one continuous moment, isn't it? The grass will always be greener, but sometimes I like it brown too.

and freedom will follow you Mikie, you'll see. Your loyalty towards freedom; Like a well-bred puppy, freedom will follow after you always. I promise.

"when you're down on your luck, and you can't harmonize,
get a girl with faraway eyes"