Ten and two.

It is a popular aphorism that you are who you choose to be, and that our choices determine how your future will end up. And I believe that. People can change who they are – they can be the people they’ve always wanted to be. But when you stop paying attention, when you hit cruise control and grab the wheel of your life with your knees while you enjoy the sights or have a French fry, things change; the car that you’re riding in tends into the same rut in the road that you’ve been trying to avoid you’re whole life. Being the person that you want to be is not difficult, but it sure as hell requires your attention.

I write this because, looking back on the last semester of school and those three months of my life, I don’t necessarily see what I wanted to at the beginning. The ideals I strived for are completely gone, surgically removed from my head leaving only the scars to tell me they’re missing. I’m beginning to settle and satisfy, to revel in the pleasures of the now instead of look to the glories of the possible future.

And the worst thing is I don’t know if that’s so wrong. I’m twenty years old, enough to have most of my worst mistakes behind me and most of my independent life ahead of me, and beyond these notions of grandeur that seem a six-year-old’s astronaut ideologies, I don’t know where I’m going, whether I should stop for gas and continue on the road to the Kennedy Space Center, or pull over at that real estate office and look for a comfortable nook to grow old. The only thing I do know beyond a shadow of a doubt is I had better be good and sure before I decide. To drift into a truck stop is not the way I want this trip to end.