let the century pass me by.

We left Hawaii at the beginning of the month for good. And we haven't spent much time being sad. Instead, we've been celebrating the upsides of leaving, like affordable groceries ($2.99 gallons of milk v. $9.99), seeing family, driving cars that pass safety inspection, and finally being able to buy "nice" things because we won't have to leave them behind when we move. We even ordered a Vitamix and had it shipped to Utah as a welcoming gift to ourselves.

But the other night before falling asleep, I thought about the small space we left behind, and for the first time I felt sad. Real honest sadness. Chase and I laid on our backs in the dark and took turns remembering out loud. I cried, thinking about the one-room apartment that we took over with our singing and our meals and our fights and our laughter; our pictures, homemade shelves and thrift store finds. I cried because the day we moved out, our apartment was a bare white box full of none of those things, and I wish I had taken more time to remember everything before it was emptied.

I can't find the right words to explain what I felt. But I mourned for my memory. For its patchiness. Because the things I remember will never be whole. My memory of our first home will never contain the myriad of emotions that I experienced there. I can't justly recreate it in my mind. I am three weeks out, and already I forget the color of our carpet and the contents of our fridge. 

And that's okay. I can't freeze time, and i'm coming to terms with that (although if I could, now wouldn't be a bad time to do it).

But sometimes, I think, it's okay to be sad for the places and people you've left behind.

the rain can't get you wet.

This past week in Hawaii has brought nothing but gray skies and rain! I've been missing my sunshine.

I've been feeling a little bit gloomy lately. I really am the most weather affected person I know (Chase can attest to this; I always ask if it's sunny out when he tries to wake me up, and he knows to lie and say yes if he actually wants me to get out of bed), so I partly blame the weather gods. But tanning weather or not, I have been feeling so lost these past couple months.

I graduated from BYU-Hawaii in political science this April, and since then I have been bussing tables at a nearby restaurant while Chase completes his last couple classes. At work I clear and set tables, fill ice bins, refill drinks, and so on. It's not torture but it doesn't feel very purposeful either. I plan on sticking with it because we are leaving the Island soon and it actually pays pretty well, but it's made me terribly aware that I don't actually know what I want to do. 

I am only 20 years old (21 in August!) but I feel lost.

And I didn't think I'd say it so soon, but I miss being a student. 
I miss the expectation to grow.
I miss being made to wrap my head around foreign concepts. I miss writing papers and taking tests and just plain going to class. I miss all of the things that I was so happy to abandon; because after 15 years in school, it is so boring not learning anything.

 I love writing, drawing, painting, cooking, photography, nutrition and a dozen other things, but I don't have a singular passion. I want to pour myself into something completely, but I'm clueless as to what. Part of me wants to go back to school, but even then I don't know what I'd study. And then I think, it's pointless to pay for more schooling when you're going to be a mom and likely not make any money. 

I'm tempted to see a fortune teller, since no one who knows me can tell me what to do. (Or maybe my path is to become one. . . I did have a lucrative palm reading business going in my middle school cafeteria until I got shut down.)