1. What

For the past two years, the most I’ve seen the sunset back home has been through paintings made for me. For these past two years, I’ve been trying to make the most of it, make time for myself, make something of myself; but it feels like all I’ve done is make a mess. Mixed in with that mess, I feel like I’ve made broad strokes that have pushed me closer to becoming the person I want to become.

For two years, I have lived in Beppu, Oita, Japan going to college. I feel extremely grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given, and next, I am heading to Germany for one year. Sometimes it gnaws at me and I think that I’m just running across the world and I miss my home. Every time I look at the paintings I just remember what I’m missing, the people I’m missing. I also feel like I’ve cursed myself by feeling like every time I leave Beppu, there are new people I’m leaving behind. I feel worried that the rest of my life ahead of me will be leaving people behind and trading off what I get to do, what I get to experience; and all for what? For myself? Am I really doing this all for myself? On the surface, it feels like I am, but I feel like I started out doing this for no one, but I’m too afraid to fall on my face or give up, so I’m just continuing to avoid failure. It was my dream because I said it was. What dream was there? It was just something I said so I had something to look forward to after high school, and I feel like I’m doing it all over again by just dangling ideas of my future education and professional life by a carrot on a stick so I just prepare myself to run in the rat race.

I have 9 days left in Japan as I’m writing this before I’m gone for a year. It feels crazy that these two years have blown past me so fast. I always tell people the factoid that when you get older a year of your is shorter in comparison. One year at fourteen years old is 1/14th of your life, at twenty it’s 1/20th. It’s just smaller and smaller in comparison each year, and soon it’ll go by in a blink of an eye. I understand why people talk about journaling now, and why we as a species love reading biographies and are fascinated with people’s journals because we can see their lives stretched out without having to look at our lives stretched out.

I don’t think I wanted to be deep or sad with this post when I started writing it, but maybe that’s just what was going on in my mind when I was trying to get something out of my mind. It’s the first thing that comes out sometimes, but I just wanted this to be a little bit of a brain dump. Maybe this might be the start of something, I always wanted to make videos but hated my voice and never had the patience to record, but writing a blog and tacking on some pictures at the end seems doable for me.

I don’t want these last few days to end, not because I never want my time here in Japan to end (I’ll come back after a year), but I just think that I don’t want any time to end. I want every second of every day to stretch into eternity, even if it’s hell, because it means I can’t waste time if it lasts forever. I saw a post on Instagram and it was a Snoopy thingy with the caption saying: You don’t live once, you live every day, you only die once. And that combined with a few other ways of thinking, I want to change the way I live so that I can live it more fully. So these blog posts are going to be me expressing the life I am attempting to live each day, so enjoy these photos from recent. Next time I’ll probably make a post about the circumstances of photos and where I took them.