Do you know what it feels like for your heart to fly? For it to almost be unbearable how your heart is going to forcefully dislodge itself from within the confines of your chest cavity, tear free of the vein- and artery-imposed shackles of the flesh, and run rampant through the streets with your happiness? I looked up from A Thousand Splendid Suns just now, with me splayed across my un-made bed the afternoon gently falling around me as I force time to take its slow turns slower, slower, to realize that this pounding in my chest -- this STRENGTH from within me -- was my own cheer. My own self-induced. Happiness. Whimsical, fanciful happiness: I am reading an amazing book in the middle of a beautiful afternoon in a house that is truly my own, that makes me comforted and warm, a house I've molded into a reflection of what I choose to see myself as, with no work clinging to my back, unanswered and ignored, with friends a few miles away, with the tangible history of the past two years of my Adult Life surrounding me. Physically, on the walls, and in the rhythmic whirs of memory the ceiling fan sweeps up in time with my mind's eye.

I'm happy!

Sad. To be leaving, to do this all over again. The realization that my afternoons of swirling whimsy and romanticized book reading are numbered within these walls. Soon, these will be the walls of someone else's storybook, the canvass on to which someone else's patterns of life will be splashed, having forgotten mine. Mine will always be the first, the backbones to the grim and grit that life will wash over these walls. Mine will always cling hardest to the virgin surface.

My life will go on, much the same as it has for the past five or six, waking in the morning, resting in the evening, and plotting my heart's dreams in between. But there will be some sorrow, some wondering about how and why life chooses to trod the tumbling paths it does. But still, the sun rises and I'll think of the NE corner of Bullwinkle where the glowing ball would glisten off the rust on the hydrocyclones before a roughened, much older friend with barbed, bushy skin and a soft heart surprises me by the valve I always stopped to check, and give me a genuine smile that said "I'm glad you're here." And then seemingly-countless hours later, the sun will set and I'll think of the SW corner on Brutus, where the rotating radar bar scanned, in incessant watch over the firewater pump below, making me notice the sun's proximity to my mind's version of the equator and whether the horizon was fluffy or sharp. And I'll wonder if I'll ever again see some of these people who have shaped my life with such rigid values of work and life and family and my role and place in all of it; in the same breath of hope and longing with which my joyful heart seems to leap from my chest, so does it sink within when it feels the hope and longing of sorrow for being able to witness the concrete edge of one phase of your life ending and a new, unknown yet less unknowable, segment about to begin. As hard as we try to meld these seeds of experiences into some broken-in, softly-worked, tilled field of life, it seems they'll always segregate themselves into orderly rows of peas here, and carrots there, with the rye in the corner.

Still, my heart pulses in and out to the machinations of its own doing. So for now I'm trying to just enjoy the cliched ride.