I am armed with the past and the will and a brick

I think 18 was the best year of my life so far. Full of everything new and success and triumph and only good things.

I'll be 20 soon, and as good as the last year was in a lot of respects, just... fuck, so many shitty things happened. I'm going to be pretty glad to say goodbye to 19. Most of them weren't even in my control. They just occurred; they forced themselves on me.

The feeling of being actually, truly sad seems so foreign, but it happens every so often lately. This summer and this year. It is such a piercing feeling. I feel like I have a strong and mostly immovable core, built up over the past five years of rapid changes and new situations and outer storms and conflagrations. That's comforting. And when some terrible arrow cuts through it all, I feel so awful I want to vomit. Each time it's a new kind of pain, foreign and surprising and mesmerizing.

I think I should stop expecting things and instead just let them happen. It always seems to work out in the end.

It's strange, the way certain songs will always be associated with certain periods of time in your mind. I've been listening to Frightened Rabbit again; the last time I did that was winter break. Hearing it again brings up so many different and conflicting emotions. I remember walking through the woods at home in the snow with my headphones in, feeling absolutely exalted and terrified and sad all at the same time. Heartbroken and euphoric, confused and enthralled. Snow always makes me feel better. It makes me want to set off into the unknown. I can remember the happiest moment of my life, one of absolute and pure euphoria and freedom. After thinking I was going to die for three months, after feeling absolutely crazy and insane and unspeakably awful, I walked home in the snow and it just broke like a fever. It fell away and I watched fat flakes falling from the gray sky; I could see them a hundred feet up hurtling toward the earth. I felt like I was dying, or melting, or falling apart into a million exalted pieces. Every so often I feel so happy that I don't think my skin can contain it.

But yeah, every time I listen to Frightened Rabbit now I'm back in the woods, feeling exalted and uneasy, happy but bitter and a little disillusioned. Tonight I just feel a little nostalgic. I want to go back to last year, before my family decided to finalize all of the fractures that had been there for so long, before the last traces of my childhood burst apart and disappeared into the ether. I always saw it coming, though, and I feel like I've been divorcing myself from home for the past four years, trying to make the final break less painful.

It's been a strange day.