change

Today at dinner I told my friends I don't understand atheism. I don't mind it, and I don't hold it against anyone, but I do not comprehend it. For a bit someone thought I was expressing my disdain for those who don't believe in any higher power, because in this place a lack of comprehension can be translated into intolerance. We like having our politically correct lines ready, just in case we may have to jump to the defense. So I explained, told her that's not what I was implying. Not an instance of boutique multiculturalism, merely a genuine inability to understand.
Somehow even my statements seem to come out as attacks these days, and I know I should probably learn not to cause offense. Cause offense to yourself if you must, trample all over your soul and sensibilities, but never those belonging to someone else. Those aren't yours to walk on.I try to stick fastidiously by those rules, and it's easier here where others play the same game.  Easier to listen, easier to appreciate, easier to learn. The power of dialogue and the importance of words.
But there's nothing more difficult than realizing that this place that I have treated for the past two years as a distant (but dear) love, partly out of my longing for home and partly because of the inevitably temporary nature of my time here, is slowly becoming the place I'm terrified of leaving and losing. We talk more about our bubble now that the bubble has completed half its life. Somehow, once this is gone I can see nothing but a looming disappointment in my interactions with people.
The ugly politics of privilege, the false convictions of being better, their world and then mine on peripheries, choosing love or choosing principles, the growing panic that the restlessness didn't stop when I had promised myself it would, the disgust with someone's illusions of self-importance, the shocks of reality.

"You cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all of the time.."
Sylvia Plath obviously knew a thing or two.

When I was 17 I met this woman. I decide she was one of the most amazing human beings I had ever encountered in my life, and I was right because she changed my life. When I look back at it, her time here probably changed her into the person I met. And then she changed me.
It's so strange because sometimes we forget what success means, and we start defining it in terms of how much we have. But then there are people who remind us that success is the number of people whose lives we touch and change, like magic that they had never anticipated but were grateful for nonetheless. She was the one person, apart from my mother, who taught me the meaning of strength.

We forget how many people we have to thank for the blessings we have everyday.
May each and every one of you find all the happiness in the world, because all of you certainly contributed to mine.

There's a guy sitting on a bench outside the creperie. He's been playing his guitar and singing for the past hour. I can't hear him, but he's performing with a lot of passion. I'm a little envious.

Before I graduate I'm going to ask a kind stranger to drive me around the Valley, so I can take pictures of random places. Like those houses we pass on the way to the mall. Because they look surreal, especially when the sky is purpleorangeblue, and because it's easy to forget the things you see. And before I leave, I should go for a walk and maybe even get lost. I'll eventually find my way back, everyone here always does.
With a year and a half left, maybe it won't be selfish of me to live.