I've been waiting for answers; to feel like I've arrived. I have somehow been waiting for the mist-shrouded solution, for the secret to coalesce, both personally and professionally. I've been looking around for someone in myself that doesn't make any mistakes, and I am forever unsatisfied and short on confidence because I haven't found it. I admire others, and look up to them, but I always feel young and unsure, because I know that I make mistakes.

Lots of times I come home at night, frustrated and isolated and missing important pieces. I try to write but there's always something important I can't say, and it makes harder to just notice the truth that I'm trying to find, to get down on paper and into solid words.

But whenever I see anything clearly, I always see that everything just is. There is writing and there is music (Granian, lately "I still see your face and so I...") ; it's enough. There is struggle and there is summer.

My Dad always used to order the green ice cream whenever my family went out together. It was one of those sweet little traditions that now reminds me what home felt like when I was a kid. Since I didn't know what pistachio was, he always told me it was pickle. He said he knew something had ended when I looked at him and said "Daddy, there's no such thing as pickle ice cream."

Sometimes I look at the kids and find faith in the light behind their smiles, their innocence- despite everything. It is like summer. And then it breaks, again and again. I am disappointed, every single time, when they cheat and lie and laugh or roll their eyes when it upsets me. It makes me feel weak, stupid, soft- which is the worst thing to be in a way, young, incompetent. I feel like a little kid finding out that the world doesn't work the way I thought it did, that there's no such thing as pickle ice cream.

(It's still real to me).

I am still and always looking for strength.