It used to be easier to say what was going on here. At first, well, no one read it. It's easy to be transparent when no one can see you anyway. Then, well, it felt like a mass email to everyone in the world who already knew me, a way of telling stories from Guatemala and then down south. It was a daily fill-in. I'd tell you what you're wondering about and some things you didn't care about too.

When I left home and moved into my first apartment, you read every detail of that adventure. When I left for Guatemala and lived there, learning Spanish, making a habit of stomach bugs, and when I came home saddened and guilty, I told you all about it. When I was accepted to a university in Tennessee, you were the first to know. You were, I told you first. When I was happy beyond belief, when I tasted what I thought was love, when I made the sort of friends that will stick the way these have, when I wrestled with principles and beliefs and ideas and when I loved nature the most, you walked through it all with me.

And there have been seasons where it was so very hard to share, so hard in fact, that I just didn't. Hibernating under silent cloaks of pride, fear, void, I don't know. Just. Not. Here.

But I don't think there has been a time like the past year of my life, when I have been so protective of myself in real life that this white page on the web is an even paler representation of who I am and Who is shaping me. It is easier to stay silent in the same way that it is easier to say to those who ask what's new, "Nothing."

I have settled into routine, monotony, life in and out and over and over and over again. I berate myself for being greedy, wanting more of out of life, and defend myself with the one thing I am, if nothing else, a Christian single. Isn't now the best time to exist without routine? I read stories and hear podcasts of people doing the things I imagine myself to do. Not big things, just different things.

I woke myself up last night, early. It was barely light, a thin strip of orange ringing our earth. I had a dream and all parts of it still stick to my insides, my mind plays it over and over again. I was me, but everything around me was not me. It was all that I've passed over, been enamored by, forgotten, lust after, ignored and wanted. And at the end of the line was the one thing I want more than anything else, but I couldn't see it. I just knew it was there and that it was for me. A flash of red, blue, sand, bigger than me, but I couldn't see it. Instead I made my way down the line checking over my options like a farmer at a livestock auction: which one will do the job for me?

And that is what this life, this website, these decisions have all been, for me: mere options because I couldn't see the real thing.