extra Ginger in that Tea, please.

To know something and to realize something are different things. I've known that I've changed, but today I realized how much. It happened slowly over the course of the two years since I graduated from college. When it happens like that it's easy not to notice.

I'm an ant in a jar in a mall. I eat crackers out of a coconut shell (it makes sense to me). This tiny, uninsulated room is excessive. I can't find much that's healthy about joining a "health club". When the sun comes out I go for a run because I need sun, and I can't get enough air.

I feel calm and more beautiful than I've ever felt. Perhaps it's the merlot, though I felt this way at 6am as well. This state of no longer being a slave to my body or a result of my mind lets me look out a cafe window and see and feel a town for what it is.

Some days I want to be a musician - to spend all day writing lyrics about life the way I've bore witness to it, the way it's made my heart lurch beat jitter jump sway and stay. Other days I want to be a bartender dressed in black, sexy and sleek and simple. Most every day I want to pick up a dirty needle off a dirty street and look over my shoulder as I walk from Camden to Phily. Always I want to believe in glory, and when I see the way the sun sets on a forest in winter, the way the browns and whites become bronze and gold and the mountains disappear from top to bottom, I do.

My heals hurt from my hiking shoes. But if you point to a peak I'll walk with you to the top. Home is somewhere up there, and though this spirit be prone to wander, it knows when it's home.