One day until the end of the month and I am wondering who I am. Today I went to the beach wearing a dress and I am feeling like sparkly pens and writing all my feelings in a lockable journal. It's this goddamn weather, maybe, sunny today and doubtless miserable tomorrow. I want it to be summer, and I never want it to be summer.

I want a job and I want to move to New Zealand. Queenstown, in particular. I imagine weekends jumping out of planes and evenings by the lake drinking wine.

I've been doing that a lot, lately. Wine. Cigarettes. This bar or that hotel, this winery, that view.

Leave a girl alone in a dress with a pack of smokes and she'll have at least two guys approach her in the time it takes you to pop inside to the loo.

He's gone back across the world. I say back, but I never knew him as being from anywhere except here. Piss-poor German and too much familiarity with this city. This town. When you can sit on top of a hill at night and name all the major roads just for looking at the streetlights, well. It's time to be gone.

I am, I repeat, I keep repeating, very ready to leave this place.

I quit my job, see, and graduated. Two degrees leave me overqualified but under-experienced. I know a lot but I can't do much. There are jobs I'd like but I don't want a career yet; I want to travel. I want to see new places, and I want to meet new people.

Difficult, I am finding, to figure out who I am. To voice this to my friends. This restlessness is not merely with this city, it's with being stagnant. With him gone I have less to fill my time. Fewer nights playing blackjack (a good thing, no doubt), but fewer nights doing anything at all.

My friends are introverted. I know this, I cultivated them. But I am set in one way in their minds and am remembering I was not always this way, and I will not always be this way, and the less depressed I feel the more I want to do, the more bothered I am by something as much as half a day doing nothing. (This is push-pull, if I am doing something I am less depressed. I need to be busy to be happy.)

They are surprised, and faintly alarmed, when I mention even the most mundane aspects of the past month. There are more particular matters, nothing too exciting but far more personal, that have scarcely touched my tongue. They seem to think I am breaking.

I have a plan, of sorts: get a job, somehow, somewhere. Probably (hopefully) not in this state, what with its 9.2% unemployment rate. Hopefully in a different country; hopefully in New Zealand. We have unfinished business, that land and I. I'd like a full summer there, or a full year. Save enough money to do the teaching-English-as-a-foreign-language thing. China, Thailand, Indonesia. Learn pieces of the language, save a little. Live in Germany, like I've always wanted to do. Get this need to be elsewhere out of my system a little.

I want to be at Lake Wanaka for New Year's, and I want to go to Hong Kong with him, if the chance comes up. I want to see Aachen again, I want to visit Iceland, Spain, Cuba, Brazil.

Eventually I'll come back here, find a job. Settle down. Eventually. When I'm ready.

I am anxious about wasting time here, but still, I have so much. I have years and years, and I fit so much just into this last month. What can I do with a year? What will I do with fifty?

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