Yeah, I’ll miss the tacos. And the cheap beer. And the gourmet ice cream sandwiches. And using my friend’s Netflix. And telling people where I’m from and them having no clue where it is. And brooding far from home. But with only nineteen (19) days left of free (free…) travel, the clock has run out. Being in California for over a month, I came to feel as if I had moved here. As if my very marketable skills of doing dishes at people’s homes and doing laundry only once a month had gotten me the proper papers to move to the American west coast, the place so many songs are sung about. But, as I knew this entire time, living other people’s lives could only last a limited amount of time, and the time has crawled slowly to its end.

Sometimes you get lost in the ichiban and banana sandwich dreams that cloud the mind so. Sometimes whatever form of ‘work’ that I pretend to do while unemployed makes me feel like I’m actually doing work and that I am in the middle of something I need to fulfil. Then, in the end, always, it is evident that it is just time, and that holding on to your once great dream in the name of ‘work’ or being there for others is just a selfish desire to be comfortable and to continue to eat tacos. Sometimes, no, always, you’ve got to go.

There is a feeling that I get regularly when things are going well. When things are going too well. Caused by my past month of events occurring too perfectly, this feeling, the one of imminent disaster, or at least looming reality, was with me. This disaster hasn’t yet hit, reality may have winked at me yesterday morning, but only to prepare me for her undoubted return, and I had one of the worst mornings of the trip because of it. That is all relative, however, because the worst morning of my trip I was still sitting in a hammock on the beach in Mexico, but mindset can take a beating wherever, whenever disaster or reality decide that he or she want to remind you that not everything is simply an ice cream sandwich in a hammock.

In an attempt to avoid reality from her full frontal that she so badly wants to show me, I will flee once again. All the while wondering if it is considered fleeing if you are fleeing in the direction of where you grew up.