Mostly I'm thinking about August, and moving away from the little town where I'm currently living. When I moved here, I anticipated putting down some roots and staying a while; of course that was true in Syracuse as well. This is a nice place, but there aren't a lot of jobs around here, and even before I got here I worried about how I would fit into the community. Despite myself I've managed to make some friends, and I realize now that I seem to have a small network of people that I like, and can turn to for support. At the same time, the semester is over but I still don't have any better place to be than the college; I technically have another job, but I am "underutilized" there (which has been a chronic problem). I'm sad to be leaving a place that seemed to hold promise, but I never really did fit in very well.
And even as I get caught in a qualified nostalgia, I'm excited about the future: I can't wait for August, even though it's also scary. I have a sense of purpose moving forward, a fairly clear idea of what I'm moving towards. That said, I can't even begin to imagine what things will look like a year from now, and it seems to me that it would be foolish to guess. [I've just deleted a longish section where I walk backwards, year by year, where I was and what I thought the future would hold - and how most of those assumptions were way off.] Maybe next year I'll be moving to Japan.
I've always had a bad habit of looking to the future rather than living in the present, and it always seems justified for one reason or other, but I also miss out on what's happening around me. So that's my challenge to myself for the summer: enjoy the fleeting and fragile present.
Huh. I should probably be painting cherry blossoms instead of cranes.
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