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until death, it is all life.

[don quixote]

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I want to go into the Peace Corps. I want to get older. I want to come back and find a house in a city that has good bones. I want to buy lots of sexy underwear and let my hair get big and crazy. I want to get a job with people who laugh and wear lots of turquoise. I want to build a garden out in the yard and take Norah on lots of walks, no leash, just us walking together and freaking out all the cats.

I want to finally make peace with my lush body. I want a beauty mark and a new last name, like I'm a crazy novelist from the twenties who doesn't want my old lovers to sue me for libel. I want friends who laugh with all their teeth showing and know lots of card games. We can play them with quick flicks of our wrists at tables in pizzerias and warm coffee shops.

I want to be taller, or maybe just to be okay with how tall I am. I want to dream about faces I haven't seen yet and lie down flat on the floor to pray.

I don't know what it is about my body, my mind, why they go so haywire in these seasons. I want to go everywhere, see everything, become a midwife, roll out bread dough on an alpaca rescue farm, throw tall slick cold pitchers on a mud-slung wheel, go to grad school and run my fingers down the cold first pages of a new-to-me book. I want to meet new people, people like me, people who are so sun-dazzled they don't know which way to turn.

If my luck holds, one day I will be mid-life and have made my peace. But not yet. Not today. Today I have no desire for that mellow place. I only want to be leaving or arriving, dancing or sleeping, diving or dry.