I never imagined my first night back (and, of course, my first day of school) to feel like this. Calm, normal... not even remotely exciting. Some boxes still linger in the corner of my room; they haven't moved since the first day I dropped them there two months ago, eager to get the move over with. My suitcase is still packed with clothes since I was far too lazy to unpack last night. Lazy? Was that really the reason? Or am I merely hindering myself from feeling wholly welcome in this room? This house? This area?

Perhaps I want a continual reminder of how this place, no matter how much I may wish it to be, will never feel like home.

There is that certain time of the night when everyone else in the house is in the middle of dreaming, granting me a certain calmness that just cannot exist with the sun. At this time, I am at my most natural, allowing my mind to take me here and there. No need to worry about who will see me doing this, being that. And for company during such a wonderful point in my night, I prefer to have no one other than Ella Fitzgerald.

This particular emotion seems to be a crossbreed between heartsickness and anxiousness. I neither lost anything worth caring for nor is there any true, imminent danger in my future. That I know of.

Still...

It is not an alien feeling for surely millions upon millions of people have felt it before at one or several points in their lives. It exists in stories, books, films, and dreams. I cannot say what it is because I confess that it is not a familiar feeling. But something about it just makes me feel like a sixteen-year-old again.

Stephenie Meyer is, despite her success, no J.K. Rowling. I shall leave the issue at that.

She drags her graphite across the off-white sheet, creating a winding gray line across that textured surface. Perhaps this is a start of another successful piece, she hoped. If not, at least she'd created another channel for her creative emotional outburst for that night. Another line parallel to the last one. One etched after another for shade. And so the lines continued to fall upon the page. With them, all the words he uninhibitedly hurled at her that night fell away.

Now, she steals glances down at her iPod in hopes of choosing the perfect playlist for this long drive home. The Republic Tigers? Whitest Boy Alive? Some '90s love songs? Anything will do in order to drown out the sound of passing cars, distracting her from revisiting the past few hours. Not knowing her fault, she endured another night of his severe and uncivil manner. And so she accelerates, taking herself and her thoughts into the dark blue night on a winding gray road across that earthen surface.

So I am now a proud* owner of a 2-month-old Golden Retriever puppy named Tobias "Tobey" Cayton.

*The adjective "proud," as seen above, can be replaced with one of the following: excited, joyful, ecstatic, abso-fucking-lutely terrified of not being completely capable of taking care of another life, anxious, etc.

Is this what motherhood feels like? Because it is just downright frightening.

My eyes burn and my joints ache. My muscles scream with every twitch my tired brain directs. I am exhausted. And here is why.

I have foolish questions for all the fools alive out there. And I am a silly nineteen year-old to hope for answers. But without your answers, dear fools, I will end up being a silly eighty year-old still asking foolish questions, seeking solutions.

What I want to know is this: Is it possible to lose part of your soul? What does it feel like? And how can you find that missing part again?

I don't know if "missing" and "lost" are even the right words to use. Still, it's better to lose part of one's soul than to have it die. In both cases, however, you are incomplete. You are left empty. How could that possibly feel like? It seems like quite the tragic case, but to be left empty, you cannot exactly bring yourself to care. Yes, it seems like a wretched situation to be in.

Is this where I find myself now? I haven't looked at my sketchbooks in months; I haven't written anything of merit (if I ever have). I want to. Oh, how I want to. But it is just not there. It is not there to help me finger through pages of old sketchbooks, to run my eyes over the assorted colors of pencils and paints, to lift my pen and bring it closer to the page. I want to. I want to.

But I just do not care. Not enough. Not at all.

So please, dear fools, help me. I beg of you.

...

I've been hungry.