help, i'm alive my heart keeps beating like a hammer

It could be...

the lack of sleep

being actually alone again

being in a big city

hormones

being hungover

the music i'm listening to

turning 24 while away from everyone i know

traveling in general

i don't know.

but

this is one of the main reasons I came here. For this feeling and for the possibilities it presents me.

This feeling that I am in total control of my life. The knowledge that somehow things really are as horrible or as wonderful as they might seem. The feeling that the usual veil over our perception that is necessary for us to live normally has lifted for a moment. This of course is no way to live practically. But these rare glimpses of the full magnitude of life are what make traveling so addicting.

Because so far this is the sort of vague, cheesy sounding rambling some of you might have heard from me before, I'll try to provide a small example in an effort to explain. Today I read a story about the earthquake in Haiti and started tearing up. I don't know anyone in Haiti and I've never been there before. I don't typically cry at stories of people dying, even in enormous disasters or wars, because I (like everyone else) separate the knowledge of these things from understanding the reality of them. But because today, for whatever reason, I feel like I can grasp reality better than usual, the story struck me as probably it should.

I miss everyone terribly right now. I want Swift to be in my lap. I want to be at home, in Nashville, in Chattanooga, and in Knoxville all at the same time. But also I want nothing more than to go to Sapa tonight (I am actually doing this) and do a trek tomorrow.

Even though I do miss my family and friends and I'm incredibly grateful to have these people in my life, I am absolutely ok with being alone. I'm the only one that I can understand(at all) or count on (completely), so that is a solid enough base for me to start from to proceed to interactions and relationships with other people.

If this post doesn't make sense to you or you think it's weird, I suppose we wouldn't be friends in the first place so maybe you should go find someone else's travel blog where you can read what they did for the last week. hah.

Dang!!