August And Everything After

The first day of August. It’s strange to think this day will never come again. There will only be one August 1st, 2005. I can’t help wondering if I’ve wasted it.

It’s not as though August is a significant month. It’s not as though the first day represents anything more than a new calendar page. Still, it somehow seems as though it’s important to understand that this day, like all days, will only come around once. We only get one shot to make it count, and then it’s gone as quickly as it came.

It sounds so obvious and generic to write about carpe diem, about making each moment count, about living life to the fullest. I don’t think and write about it as a realization, but as a constant reminder to myself that the theory forever rings true. The older I get, the more I let the days roll by without giving much thought about it one way or another. Honestly, I can barely recall the last two months of summer. It seems strange that people will be leaving for school again soon. My life is so different every couple of months, filled with different people, different events, different thoughts, that I can’t see it as a big picture. I look back at my life and find a collection of scenes that cannot be pieced together. Everything is scattered.

My world is forever changing and I am forever changing in it. By the end of the month, my friends will be gone, I’ll be leaving my job and I’ll be back at school. Everything will be different. The trouble I’m having with it is not that it will be different, but that I’m completely ambivalent to it. I’ve had such wanderlust for the past two years, that constantly changing has ironically, become routine and mundane. I’ve fought so hard against settling that I’m in a constant cycle of moving. Every three months it hits like clockwork, the desire to move on, get out, escape. I start to feel trapped in my own life.

It’s good, I suppose, to want something new, something more. It’s good to want to evolve. I just wish I could settle a bit more than I allow myself to. I wish I could be content with the present. I’m going to try and do that now. Now, I’ll just enjoy August 2005 and all the splendor it has to offer. After all, it will only come around once.