the next big thing

i've wanted to write here for a while now. tonight my soccer team celebrated our season ending 11-1 loss with a few pitchers so why not write now. write now right now. that is a drunk mind at work. though not drunk. just that little buzz, the one i feel first in my cheeks and then in my sense of humor. i still think i am allergic to alcohol. one drink and my face is hot and blotchy. although maybe that is just an excuse for being a lightweight. who knows?

here's what i wanted to say.

i want to write. i want to write a million things. poetry, first. i want to write poems. i don't care if people read them. really, i don't care. i just want the words to travel down from whatever cortex or lobe in my brain makes words and ideas and invests them with feeling and out my finger tips onto the keyboard or paper or the glass of the shower door. i want to write prose. i want to journal. i just want to put meaningful ideas into words. i want to express myself is what it comes down to. that's a starting point, i suppose, but it has to be more than want. it has to be need. it is getting to be. my fingers itch. i hold a pen in my hands and draw mindless circles, over and over until they fill the page. the words will come. i know it. i am committed to this.

i have been reading poetry all day every day. my next unit is poetry. i am hooked again. all of a sudden i am remembering the high school days when brianna would leave little paint swatches in the pages of poetry books at our school library and i would dig through the books, find these little bookmarks, and devour whatever poem was there. and then i'd keep going. e.e. cummings. Robert Frost. Michael Ondaatje. and so on and so forth until i read my library out of poems. or at least poems that i deemed worth reading. i've always been a critic. once i competed in a local speech competition. it was part of speech & debate club. i was in grade ten and i read birches by robert frost. it is still one of my all time favorite poems. i placed third and qualified for provincials. but the teachers went on strike and provincials were cancelled that year. my debate team was supposed to go too. then the next year our teacher sponsor dropped out and my speech & debate ambitions were squashed. so i started playing sports. when one door closes, i guess.

but this is mostly what i wanted to say.

i am happy. for the first time in i can't even say how long i am happy. it isn't just this fleeting, this too shall pass, feeling of happiness. it's a deep down, in my hands, onwards and upwards feeling of happiness. i don't know what to attribute it to, exactly. this feeling that for the first time in a long time i can see a future that is full of promise. and it's my own fault i didn't feel it sooner. my own fault for not believing in myself enough to a) trust in my original desire to be a teacher or b) trusting in my belief that i did not want to be a teacher and changing paths. but instead i stayed on a path that i firmly believed wasn't the right one. the path that wasn't meant for me. and suddenly i'm here. faced with a future that absolutely terrifies me because of it's uncertainty. but one that also fills me with the greatest sense of optimism that i've ever had. this is my life. i'm doing something that i love and i will continue to have opportunities to do this thing i love, as long as i make them. the last time i had this feeling, this sense that the whole world was laid out at my feet for me to do with as i please, was probably when i graduated high school and moved to victoria. after that it was all a plan. for 5 years, then 6. i enjoyed it, don't get me wrong. there were amazing times. from shotgun bitches and strobe lights to my first love and everything in between. but i was never as happy as i have felt lately. it just feels surreal. i'm used to this sense of "just 2 more years, just 3 more semesters, just my practicum". always waiting for the next big thing. and here it is.

so how about that?