I fought so hard for this reality. Tooth and nail, hands over feet. Millions of concessions, a year of battling cowardly disillusionment. Learning to take criticism. Learning to break past my own protective structures in order to feel engaged in living and not avoiding. A year and half living in a city without speaking its language. A year of learning that I had no clue about how to actually love. And that my enthusiasm was great, necessary, but that shit, was I all shades of wrong. Confronting myself on terms of realism, the possible, and learning, painfully, to differentiate between being stuck like a block in reality, empty and hollow, and being present enough to live life as is. Between being an idealistic and one who hides behind dreaming and surrealities.

I fought so hard, and I swear that there were times when I was on the very edge of my own personally made hell. From giving up, becoming jaded and losing my natural love of life. So close that it terrified the very core of my being, because I always believed in my own infallibility in believing in life and in myself. Almost lost my spirited, fiery core. Terrified that I had followed my gut instinct and trusted, most importantly, trusted that instinct (and in effect, trusted myself) in my decisions and that they were wrong. In my 180 that led me to Paris.

But instead of falling into the abyss, or losing the parts of myself I hold dear after becoming worn the passage of time, from constantly having to be resourceful, independent, and open in a way I could never have imagined, I made it. Survived isn't the right term. I came out miles, leagues ahead, somewhere a thousand times more wonderful and full, just full, than I ever imagined. I think in life, it is so important to take the time to recognize that YES! We arrived here, where we wanted and where we planned, and it is beyond anything we had envisioned. That living is such an amazing state of being; the endeavor of life, so precious, so shattering in all ways. The depths of human emotion, the capacity for feeling.

And so tonight, internet, I teared up. Because I allowed myself that singular moment where everything negative falls into the shadow of everything beautiful. To recognize the good moments in life, celebrate them with an embarassing amount of enthusiasm, and to let the negatives enter and leave equally as swiftly. Indescribable, when you uncover the secret of a wholly personal sort of celebration. It warms every organic molecule and every hidden unnamed spiritual crevice, thick, warm honey pouring through veins, grey matter, out your eyes. And you know that you will always, always be okay, and than you are more than enough. You are everything you want because life is so amazing like that; malleable, open to action. You were never not enough. And you did good, you did so good, and I am so proud of you for not giving up literally of figuratively. I imagined a world where my inner strength would knock down everything and that was the key to my future, my existence. I believed in destructive action without realizing it. Instead, I found a world offering my the scariest question of all; can you change? will you listen? are you willing to hear what you don't want to and learn from it? be criticized? learn that your entire life and personality makeup was a happy accident of being born where you were, in those circumstances?

Combined: are you ready to be taken apart? to not keep your hands over eyes during the process, but keep your eyes and ears and heart wide open, even if it stings? makes you uncomfortable? to be taken apart, and to put yourself back together?

This year was uncomfortable. It was a whirlwind of new new not able to do xyz, from school to speaking. I am proud of you, Kate. You learned how to revel in being uncomfortable. To make a cosmic wedgie into a makeshift g string. And for the first time you didn't have to analyze, dwell, decorate those tears shed solely for you, because there was simply no question that they were only, only for yourself.

Not black and white ways of living. There are always anxious grey areas, always the less than ideal. But it's all very human. Being afraid that P will hurt me somehow. That he will feel warped by my pure, sometimes naive, absolute love, translate the intensity for pressure. Apart from rocky times. But when I am the most sure that sort of thing isn't possible. When I believe that he holds friendship and respect as I do...I am terrified to be proven wrong. What that might mean for me, when I believe so much, put so much stake on the fact that things are as they seem, we are of the same understanding, and not some romantic shadow world where its the unsaid! that takes control and asserting ego! through selfish testing of personally made boundaries. When you are in love, there is an element of mourning in it. To seek something so absolute in the capricious form of another human. The catasrophies of whim. So I will pray as only an atheist can, to the stars, to my own naked skin, pray that he won't hurt me. isn't. it is the only thing I can do. We are young yet in the years of companionship and trust, it will come. I don't believe in implicit trust, because I believe more in the ancient dance between time and action where half the power of trust comes from its difficulty to profess and also to live up to. To be human...so fragile. To love? Endless, endless in its effects, shape and form. To accept your own membership to a humanity; and not to beat yourself up when you feel like you inject in the tiny air that connects conscious action this little plea;

please, please, oh please, just don't hurt me.

Because life is hard, and we must be forgiving.

Paris is warming up, waking up, and the colors! The sounds! The thaw, the goddamn thaw! Finally, it is the spring of my life.
Finally, it is living.