The future sprawls out in front of me and I am a cautious child stepping uncertainly into the world. Here in Vancouver, my family and friends lay elsewhere, their comfort and intimacy outside of my grasp. Here there is a solitude I have not experienced in years, an aloneness that is beautifully comforting and scary at the same time.

In myself I look for understanding. In myself I have found companionship. It's always slightly unsettling after realizing that I have carried out an hour's conversation in my head, as if I were different characters living in the same skin. When I am alone, I sense I am not. Perhaps there are ghosts inside of me, spirits of the people I once were flowing in my blood.

The past is fading from me. Quiet nights alone in coffee shops; the sound of live music and laughter touching my soul; fireworks in July - these memories have taken on a dreamlike quality and I know that in a while, their feelings will disappear, their depth but a vague line of color on a saturated canvas.

What does it mean when you begin to know that what once was will never be again? Because it once seemed to me that the past gave me the future, from it I could perhaps discern a pattern of what lies ahead, but lately I have come to realize that I don't really know anything at all. This disturbs me a little and sometimes a lot.

And then I see that I have never really known anything, that my life has been a series of coincidences with a director that I can only call a soul. A soul that I have seen very briefly for moments at a time. And I see that there is nothing to do but to trust this spirit, this universe inside of me, to believe that it will one day take me home.