I’m on my way to check out the SIUC campus. I’m sitting here listening to my ipod and going through my thousands of accumulated pictures on it, and I can’t help but feel reflective. I’m on the brink of one of the biggest turning points in my life: leaving my warm little nest at home and going off to the real world on my own.

I’m thinking about how I’m sitting in the backseat of my parents car while they drive me four hours away from home to check out my possible future home. Soon enough, I’ll be in the drivers seat. I’ll be the pilot of my own life. That excites me and it scares me.

I’m thinking about all the faces I’m seeing in these old pictures that have been in my life for the past six years. How I miss some of them. How I don’t miss others. How I sit by some of them in class and you’d think we never knew each other. That makes me sad. I even miss the people that were shitty friends in the end, because at one time they felt like the best. I miss Meg and even Meredith sometimes. In about 8 months, all of us that have been held together by a single thread of going to the same school, will all be parting ways and possibly never seeing each other again. Then they will all truly be just a memory from my past.

I’m thinking about how I miss the familiarity of certain places and people. I miss the scents, and the hands I knew so well, and the voices, and the small stuff. If you threw the present me into the body of the past me, I would be so damn out of place I wouldn’t even know what to do. I hate how things change. But they have to.

It’s always something.

I’m thinking about how I need to run far away from Jacksonville. I need to stay strong and not get sucked into the vacuum of comfortability.

I’m thinking about the impact music has on me and it’s ability to narrate my life for me.

I’m thinking about all the new people I will meet today and the many more that are to come. Which ones will end up changing my life?

I’m thinking about how I’ve listened to Blink 182’s greatest hits album in my car for at least a straight month. What’s my age again?

I’m thinking about how I won’t dance again for a studio or on a team. I’m happier now without it, but when I see pictures of dance or dancers or pointe shoes or watch a routine on television, I miss it. Just one more thing for me to miss.

I miss things too fucking much. I think that’s my problem.

My baggage could stand to be a little lighter.

I’m thinking about concerts, and music being so loud it rocks my rib cage, and breathing in the same room as Conor Oberst, and poems, and photography that moves me.

I’m thinking about how I can’t wait to do art for the rest of my life because I love it with my whole heart and it makes me feel alive.

My mind is all over the place today, and I wish it would be more often.