If this all comes together as I hope it will then this journal will read as a story. A scattered narrative that will ruminate on the past and (attempt to) define the present. I don’t know what the future holds, but I am not without a plan. In two months I will be Thailand…maybe three. But in 2017 I will leave behind the last six years on a new adventure. I’m with my doubts – You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that – Hemingway – but I’m also with hope.

Because without hope, in all of it’s irrationality, life would be nothing. That despite the billowing pillars of smoke, the flames might still be extinguished. That one day the rains might subside. That the cards might change. That the current might carry us to where fortune smiles. That despite our mistakes, we have paid our dues.

Point being, I’m optimistic these days. Someways back I withdrew within myself and my world seemed to shrink. It was confined to the square feet of a third floor apartment on  La Fayette Park Place. I used people, I used drugs, and the only thing that seemed to matter was my dog. But this entry is not about all that. I’m feeling like me again. And it’s a good way to feel. A Summer with the people who love you unconditionally and want nothing but to see you happy can have that effect. But it’s up to you to make sure that you carry that forward.

I’ve lost focus. I’ll return to those thoughts another time. In regards to these entries: I can only be as sincere as I feel on any given day, and the truth sometimes need a little something extra to make it a story worth telling. This is, more than anything else, letters to myself. With expectations that range from low to towering, I’m trying to make sense of this world.

What I hope for is to leave a piece of myself behind after I’m gone. Some fragment of my being. Proof that I was once here – and had something to say about it. That until society implodes and humanity ceases to be, some person could spend a little time in my stead and hear me out. But for that to happen I’d have to actually write something and what that is I’m not sure of. So I live life watching the past in a reflection. Trying to pause for however long it takes to sort through my twenty-five years of existence and examine the moments that in this quarter century have had some sort of importance –if any – ascribed to them. If I could do that then I think I could find the story I’d like to tell. But the cracked lens of the memory distorts all that’s ever happened, and while I desperately try to make sense of it, as I move further and further away, the text all seems to blend together.

– E. Booker

Narrators Notes Note