I am adrift on a boat that goes nowhere--nowhere I've been before, and nowhere anyone else has ever been, either. My currency is traded in for the shirt on my back and the food at my feet, and my oars have been pitched aside, and now float somewhere far behind in the murky distance, for fear that I would use them to turn back to a dying land. The sun at my front, tinging red the skin on my cheeks and my knees, and the dark of what has been behind, fading into memory a moment at a time.

I don't know what happens now. I don't know what happens next. If you ask me where I will be in nine months, I could not possibly tell you--let alone where I will be in 12 months. There is a part of me which thinks man is not made for such freedom--such a vast and terrible empty howling of option and choice. There is too much to consider, and not enough time or energy to consider it, and only the very rash can get away with tossing their life to the wind.

What do I do now? Where do I go? I don't know who I will be in six months, what sort of me I will have become; I don't know whether this fall will break me. It could--so, so easily. But whether the breaking would be in the coming, the staying, or the going? I do not know. What does it matter? Even if it does not break me, will going back in January--alone--do that for me? With almost everyone who actually means something to me gone, will it just be a painful reminder?

Life doesn't suck, not yet, but it isn't easy, and it is nothing short of terrifying and draining right now. How the hell are you supposed to make any good choices when you're uninformed, inexperienced, and emotionally compromised? And given that, why should good decisions be expected at all? If it were just decisions that were necessary, anything in the universe could do that. But damned if we aren't expected to make good decisions. And damned if I don't demand that of myself.

I will do what I have always done, of course: nothing more, nothing less than what I can do. Than what I really, truly want to do. Have I ever done anything I haven't wanted to do, on some level? Not when choice was given me. The consequences always guarantee you do what you want to out of the choices presented. And I'm not hardly about to stop doing what I want--that would hardly be human of me.

And so I will rage. And so I will tremble. And so I will weep tears which never fall down my face and only burn like smooth rich bourbon in the back of my throat. And so I will make my way through this barren, bustling, brimming world: full of an entire Humanity just

like

me.