Despite the utter uneventful-ness of this summer, it certainly has had its ups and downs. I think it’s because I’ve had so much time to..think. Not that I usually don’t think, but one must admit that a busy life leaves little time for contemplation of it, and in the best sense of such a life, ignorance is bliss.

But while spending hours on a patio staring at dirt and clouds, some days I’m mollified by everything in front of me. Exactly two weeks from today, I’ll be trekking west in an RV (yes—an RV) on I-40 for the six or seven hours it will take to reach Flagstaff, where I’ll be setting up a room with a complete stranger, studying for classes I’m so passionate about and so completely unsure of their usefulness, and defining my life by me, and me alone, for once. It’s the type of anxiousness that fills you with the beauty of what you don’t know waits for you.

And yet other days, I sit on the cement steps and can’t remember why I’m going. I know why, of course—it’s college and it’s life and this is what I’m supposed to do with it. But where is it all going to take me, after all? Maybe I’ll end up curating at the Met, but maybe I’ll end up making coffee around the corner, and I can’t decide which would make me happier. You don’t need college to make coffee or to live life and live it fully. But life tells us that, if you’re intelligent, you go to college. I know I’m intelligent, do I need a bachelors degree to prove that to myself? Or am I just wasting time?

Part of me wants everything you’re supposed to want. Part of me wants the amazing job at a well-known art museum, the studio apartment with the small balcony and the new Kenmore refrigerator with a bottle of wine inside, the friends and the relationships and the security of being a part of what everyone else in this world is.

But another, really big, nagging part of me wants the unsureness of the wanderer, taking life with every second and every lemon it hands me and pushing against the motions rather than being swept up with them. It wants the comfort of friends but the acceptance that they—like I—will always be coming and going. The campfires, driving with no directions, the dirt under my fingernails, the journals of poems and the lack of sleep for writing them, the tattoo-on-a-random-Tuesday and a box of money under the bed that isn’t much, but is more than a soul really needs. A small job, but a job that isn’t a life (because I never want a title on a paycheck to define me)—to prove to myself that I’m more than shampoo bottles and new shoes and the idea that I may or may not possess intelligence.

But nevertheless, whichever way I choose to go, I will be on that highway in two weeks, with my boxes and my new shoes and my poetry and my doubts and my excitement—and not much else.

And who knows, maybe in the end I will have it all.