fragments.

i. I blatantly stole this from Kendall. I guess that's what true internet friendship is, borrowing and creating and being okay with it.

ii. I haven't blogged in two months. Life has been happening since then. For instance:

iii. I got a haircut. See?

iv. My family moved to Colorado. This weekend, we're permanently moving to the town where my mom grew up- in the mountains. I love the mountains more than I could ever say, and yet, I miss the cornfields in Indiana and the fall sunsets where it looked like someone took a match to the sky. 

v. Stephen Chbosky. Do you know him? You might recognize his book. I sent some writing to him a month ago. Two weeks after I sent it, I received an email from his assistant. He called me a few days later. "Oh my god," he said, and I recognized his voice from watching interviews with him and Emma Watson, and the whole moment felt unbelievably surreal, "Oh my god, you are a natural born novelist. I was blown away." And then we talked for 15 minutes, and then he told me to call him whenever, and then he wrote me a letter of recommendation to...

vi. Pratt. Last night, I entered in my Social Security number, updated the essay portion, uploaded my writing portfolio, and submitted my application to Pratt in Brooklyn for creative writing next year. I want to go there more than I've wanted anything in a long time. If I can get in, if I can pay for it, I'll move to New York next August.

vii. My best friend is having brain surgery in a month. I am so scared and so worried. 

viii. "When it's time to go, you need to go because you're going to find something new." -Pat Cleveland. In July, the one year mark came and went, and now I've been in America without leaving for well over a year, and it is so beyond time to leave. I've been researching tickets to Paris for the summer, dreaming of spending the summer writing, trying to convince my parents that I can sleep on the floor of Shakespeare & Co. But Paris and Europe are familiar to me, and I want to go somewhere new, somewhere different. Does anyone want to go on an adventure with me? 

ix. "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know." Even though I haven't written anything here in awhile, I've been writing all the time, and I'm learning that Mr. Hemingway was right- the important thing is writing, and writing honestly. 

x. "What has God been teaching you lately?" I texted Jillian earlier this morning after someone asked me that same question and I stumbled out something about contentment. And because Jillian is kind and smart and important and maybe most of all, self aware and articulate, she responded with, "That is a very good question. I really have to give it more thought, especially because I forget to listen to God a lot. Mostly though, to live in THIS now, not yesterday's now, or tomorrow's now. And to stop trying to control situations. That I am not responsible for the choices or mistakes of everyone I love. To stop being so cynical and just love people. Love is inefficient and all that." She followed it up with asking me what God has been teaching me, and a text about a boy, and I smiled because that's the kind of friendship we have. And I said, more articulate than the first time I tried to say it, "Me...I think I'm learning how to be content. That even though I don't want to be in Colorado, I can still learn and grow here. And I think I'm learning how to trust and how to be vulnerable, even when it's hard and scary." What has God been teaching you? 

xi. This post came at the request of my brother Joseph and my friend William. It won't be so long between this and the next post, okay? 

ps. here is something I wrote, and here is an interview I did.