Verb: to be a young person traveling through Europe alone with a journal; to frantically journal in it. Whenever anyone asks you what your deal is, you lie and say you’ve been hired to write a book about traveling through Europe and that’s why you’re so frantically writing everything down, then the person sort of nods and walks away, either blown away or doubting you, and you sit there wondering why you felt the need to lie that lie, but then start to practice saying it aloud so that next time it sounds more believable.

The other night I yawned and suddenly my brain ripped me back eleven years to standing outside of a clothing store in Milan, peering through the window to see if they sold pants, because I went to Europe for a month without any pants at all because I was 22 years old and how is that I was allowed to go to Europe for a month by myself. Remembering this feeling of lost-ness and wonder and this constant sense of NO ONE IN THE WORLD KNOWS WHERE I AM compelled me to bust out my old Journal from the trip. It’s full of self portraits and angry and wondrous poetry about hurricanes and paintings and nuns,  and cliched rumination on americans abroad.   I like to flip through it sometimes to remember what it’s like to have only one job: to wander, to ponder, to find and eat a weird sandwich, to write it all down. I miss having a journal. I guess this blog is my journal, but it doesn’t feel the same. It’s cleaner. Less private. A journal is for secret thoughts. For muck. I want to have a journal again for the stuff beneath the stuff beneath the stuff.