I’ve been on such extreme blogging hiatus that coming back is a little daunting. OK, that’s a lie— it’s actually pretty exciting, but the task of filling in all the blanks I’ve left in this journal since I romantically jetset off to France for a couple months makes me anxious.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: France sucked.

Every reader who's not a student at Savannah College of Art and Design will find that depressing, probably a bit surprising, but generally acceptable. Any reader who is a SCAD student is (guaranteed) currently staring at their screen in open-mouthed, abject horror because every— and I mean every— student that has done the Lacoste off-campus program claims it to be the “best experience of their, like, whole entire life.”

Half of their claim is true— it was an experience, and I’ll go so far as to say that half of it was enjoyable. But there was another half— a deep, dark, secret half that yearns for the blood of the innocent— that downright sucked.

I’m not in the mood to hash out (or willing to maliciously bore you with) all the details that made my stay in France a gigantic heaping portion of Fail, so I’ll skip ahead to the part where my life started to bring me home again:

I was flying on a plane by myself. It was the first time I’d ever flown alone, and to make the experience as traumatic as possible, I choose to lose my solo-flight virginity in a non-English speaking country. I got there too early, waited in line for the wrong ticket desk, used the wrong French word to order my breakfast, and spent two hours spread across a cushionless airport bench drumming the beat to Lady GaGa songs on my breastbone while French suits stared apathetically at me from across the waiting area. I fidgeted, checked my gate number a thousand times just to make sure one more time that I was in the right spot, and waited with all the anticipation in the world.

I was going to meet my best friend. More importantly, I was going to meet a shining beacon of the love and normality I’d left in America.

The entire flight, I clutched my fingers around the tattooed heart on my chest trying, as I had been for the last two months, to squeeze out some of the love I’d placed in there before making the 5,000 mile journey. I prayed for us to meet up safely— for everything to go smoothly (unlike the previous entirety of wreckage known as my France experience), and when we finally met up, I felt safe for the first time in months.

We made our way together across Europe, literally cheering as we left France for the United Kingdom (read: English Speaking Countries, thank god!), and once we’d had enough, we accomplished what I’d been most looking forward to: we flew on a plane that landed in the United States of America.

In the first weeks back, I shed all remaining symptoms of French depression and learned how to live my life again— how to be the me I couldn’t seem to dig out in France. I hugged people I truly loved, slept in a bed that didn’t bruise me, returned to Savannah, fully enjoyed driving a car again, ordered food in English, laughed with friends… I felt that piece of me that had been missing the last three months slide back into place, and smiled again.

There's nothing like coming home.

So, for anyone that doesn't know: I'm finally inked. Two more photos of it under the cut.

It's permanent. They tell me it never comes off. I've been talking about getting it done for years now, so I guess it's really strange and sort of surreal that it's there every morning when I wake up. But I love it; I love what it represents in my life, and how something so small can encompass a feeling so infinite. I've realized that talking about it with others really makes me uncomfortable though, because it is something so personal, and I feel like no explanation I could verbally give will ever make them fully understand. I don't know, it's weird.



( PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS LIKE, 'WHAT IS WRONG?' ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, THAT IS JUST MY FACE )

I found this quote today; I can't get over how me it is:

"Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understands, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not."

One more day left in America. ... Yeah.

"It doesn't count if you believe in yourself when it's easy to believe in yourself. It doesn't count if you believe the world can be a better place when the future looks bright. It doesn't count if you think you're going to make it when the finish line is right in front of you.

It counts when it's hard to believe in yourself, when it looks like the world's going to end and you've still got a long way to go.

That's when it counts. That's when it matters the most."

I wish everyone in the world could figure this out. I wish a lot of things for a lot of people lately. Mostly I wish I were in France already, waking up to mountains and thousand-year-old buildings. Thirty more days to go...

It's not about smitten couples. It's not about solitary singles. It's not about cards or flowers or candy hearts. It's not even about Saint Valentine (who you may be surprised to find you know nothing about).

It's just about love: the love you give to other people— any creature tall or small— and the love you give to yourself.

You, my valentine, are loved.

A woman stopped me in the parking lot on my way into Fresh Market today. She was halfway to the store herself, pushing a cart that was making a god-awful amount of noise. When she caught sight of me, she stopped, and asked if I would take the cart inside for her. "I'm just too lazy," she said. I shrugged, took it from her, and kept walking. I just assumed that she had mistakenly thought I was an employee or something on accident. I took the cart inside, grabbed what I needed and left.

Twenty minutes later, I'm across the street in the main lobby of Publix (where I can actually afford to buy groceries), desperately trying to pry a cart away from the rest with absolutely no success. As all mature, functioning adults of society would, I got pissed off and gave the cart I was trying to remove a really good kick. It shook, rattled, and then... nothing happened. Whoa, shocker there! I was just about to do something really drastic and most likely embarrassing when a man coming out of the store said, "Here, take this one." He unloaded his three (literally, I counted) items out of the cart and rolled it toward me.

It was such a simple equation: help someone, someone helps you.

I wish, I wish, I wish.

I have a thousand wishes, and I'm really just praying the one that is you comes true.

Consideration for today: "What is it that makes you happy?"

It sounds like a stupid question. The average person can usually fish a generic answer out of their butt, like "laughter" or "good sex" or "chocolate cake," and they're passable answers, but they avoid delving into the deeper edge of just what makes them, as an individual, spark from the inside out. They lack the detail, the why and how. When we're kids, everything is new, so discovering what makes our hearts content is a natural curiosity we write off as growing up. Once we're grown, we stop questioning, we get bogged down under frivolous fears, house chores, heartbreak, diets, jobs we hate, and guilt, and just like that, our vision of the world shifts.

I see most of the world mourn that loss without realizing it. They're always too busy to notice the person they began as slipping away. The shift happens too gradually, like water smoothing over stone. They change from boulders to pebbles, no less significant, smoother and more attractive, but lacking the grandeur of the world tucked into their memories. They look back at the best time of their lives as something lost, something that went away, when no loss occurred at all outside of a few simple changes.

When I was a kid, I loved being outside. I liked catching things: bugs, fish, lizards, butterflies, because once I caught them, I could get up close and see the details. I liked little things, like Barbie shoes and earrings and tiny figurines. My favorite meals were anything consisting of pasta and some type of cheese. I loved being with my parents. Making my friends laugh was a sense of pride for me. I really enjoyed coloring books. All these things made me happy.

I still love nature: national parks; the way the rain sounds at my parent's house, drumming down on the skylights and filtering through the branches; the organic shapes and textures it produces, bird sketches, and the patterns that comprise birch bark; cold, crisp winter days; fresh tangerines. I love exploring and photographing new places, the process of putting my make-up on, the smell of paperback novels, eating raw cookie dough and feeling the way the sugar grits in my teeth. Wet paint all over my hands, dripping, bright and wet. Gemstones, moonlight, reading in the bath. Fantasy stories, the cat curled up against me when I wake up during a nap, hardwood floors, victorian accents, laughing at my Dad's puns and corny jokes and the way my Mom absentmindedly pets me while I'm close to her. Imogen Heap's voice, British accents, spaghetti, the way my car adjusts the volume with my speed. Attending an art college where your professors constantly reinforce that if you're not doing what you love, you're not doing anything at all. Typography: serifs, old style, the font Georgia, perfect kerning that sings right off the page. My best friends, the way we lose our filters when we're together and share the real things, the true things, swapping stories and making memories that will become the stories of our lives when we're at the end. Bokeh, fruit juice, earrings, eyelashes, trinkets, antique postcards, and art prints. These all equate to my definition of happiness; this is what it is that makes me happy.