i was driving to get some donuts earlier tonight and the sky, it was cloudless and the stars were bright and i keep thinking about brazil.

five years ago i went to louisiana. i fell in love with the place. all that space, miles driving without another car around, just tall thin trees and the sun and that overwhelming feeling i get sometimes of just everything good about the south pressing in, around the car.

the gas stations that sold buckets of shrimp.

the mystery and the history i imagined back off in the deep trees.

and i think about brazil.

i think about the trees that must be tall. the coast. the ocean late at night.

i worry, a little, about not being good enough for the job, about not being able to do it, about failing.

about going to a country i don't speak the language of and getting lost. getting myself into a situation i can't get out of.

but, in a way, that's what i want. i want to be captured, i want to be tied up in something i don't completely understand, something that could, quite possibly, result in my death.

because i imagine i'll walk away from it all. that a year, three years, seven, i'll fly back into the states.

i'll get off that plane a little bit darker, a little bit older, weigh a little less.

but in my arms i'll feel those trees, that dirt street i walked down with her, the dirty creeks and the languages learned.

and in my shoulders will be the grass tickling me as i looked up at the sky, those new stars, the brightness, that moon shining.

ill have new callouses, new scars, maybe broken bones.

i know, somewhere out there, brazil or korea or japan or eastern europe, i'll find myself. i'll stumble over a root and right into whatever it is i'm supposed to become.

it'll be like putting on my favorite jacket, i think, the one that weighs just right on your shoulders.

and i can feel it, every now and again, this person i think i've got it in me to become. and there are times i lose it, times when i'm an asshole to kim and i walk away hating everything i've become. times when i'm so frustrated with the fact that i just can't let it all go.

but then there are other times, when there i am, that person that kim must have saw in me years ago, that person that emily must have saw not too long ago, and that person the girl, for whatever reason, still continues to see in me.

and every time i do something stupid, foolish, wrong, assholish of me, i'm letting them all down, that part of them loved me. that looked at me with such beautiful eyes.

and so i know that brazil is the best thing that could happen to me, even if i end up hating it.

because it'll just be a step along the way to being that person.

it'll give me trees and sky and land.

it'll give me the space i've always needed.

it'll make me stronger. better. more sure of myself. and maybe ill find that person that i was for them, before i became this asshole, before i became needy.

and that's all i can really do to show them how thankful i've been for their pressence in my life. and how much i've loved them for just being there when they were. and when they weren't.

and so i'm waiting for those nights, in brazil. im waiting for the plane ride down there. the marketplace. the kids. the food and the heat and the water.

if everything goes through it's less than three months away.

i really want to do this. i really want to lose myself again, and find myself again. i want to find that stupid, unadultarated joy again.

the happiness in the stars on a drive to donuts. the peace in the wheels thumping against the gray concrete bookended by huge trees.

and maybe it's not in brazil, maybe it's not in arizona, maybe it's not in boston or taiwan or the edges of the rain forest. but maybe pieces of it are.

and i want to start. i want to begin.