This mixed bag of adventures has placed into a man I could have wrapped around my finger just by opening my mouth. There's a certain charm to knowing that if I tried, I could have just about any man that I wanted. And somehow, I hardly ever care. I am almost twenty three years old. Shouldn't I care more about the way my hair falls in the morning, and how many calls have shown up on my missed list? My mother wants me set up, and I feel like she's relating her own experiences of meeting the person she would marry (my father, of course) around the age that I am now.

I remember long ago that she once told me that twenty three was the happiest year of her life. Even if that thought has changed in the years since, at one point in time, she considered my soon to be age her happiest. It's obvious she wishes the same for me, but I'm not interested. My time will be spent blundering over the falls and laughing when I get bruised. (Yes, apparently I'm a masochist).

Even after going on a few dates, closing the door to my room and cutting out all the noise and the heavy current of the city awakens me more than the prospect of a man. I certainly would have a difficult time living in any non-modern era.

I'm slowly sinking in.

And I have a feeling that when I look back on my time spent in this dense urban surburbia, it will mirror how I felt about my time spent in Baltimore. Nostalgia is always better in hindsight.

The trapped feeling I held onto for eight months has slipped away and I'm taking advantage of the freedom of having four wheels instead of two feet with the slight twinge of polluting the environment. (Although, buses running off-peak emit more than cars.) Shirlington is still only a bike ride away, and Del Ray as well, a ride I'd always be happy to take, but now my circle of living space has expanded into DC. The possibilities of having an actual city within reach means that my own experiences can be endless.

It's the end of the summer and those few months adding up to a year are closing in. I will have been here a year at the end of October and I know I'm getting restless. The energy spent acquiring a job, dropping a life, moving two and a half hours away was both tough and exhilarating. Shortly thereafter, the doldrums of life set in, and no matter how much I try to shake my life up, there's only so much I can do without shaking everything out. The unrelenting apathy of adulthood was something I was never expecting. And here it is.

I've been having odd sleeping schedules recently. I can go a few days of midnight to seven-thirty (ok, it's probably eight), one or two in the morning until eight, and then one day when I'll feel some sort of exhaustion and lie down at 7:30. And when I have enough time to dream, I've been dreaming about him. He's always someone different, but with that same spark that I loved so deeply. The only person I've loved, and the only person that has encouraged me to be ever more than I am. There's something odd about the way I last talked to him, how I knew that if I saw him I would know that instant that any affection I had for Will was false, that I was living some life just because it was the thing to do, it was comfortable, I liked him, we got along. But beyond that, there wasn't anything there. We were friends, really good, exclusive friends, but we didn't have that thing that Tim and I had.

Nothing I'm doing now is all that comfortable, besides designing. And I'm caught wondering if I'm dreaming about him because I'm lonely or because there was something there that I left behind.

When I left my parent's house, I was alone and the house was quiet, but at the same time, it wasn't. It was like the place was calling me, closing around me, beckoning me back home. I wondered if it was this way for everyone, if your home suddenly isn't your home anymore, would you ever find a new place to call home? Would there ever be a place where I could feel comfortable again?