Vignettes

This summer has been a story composed of vignettes.

Over the course of three months, I've woken up in 14 different places across 9 cities in 4 countries, and as a result my memory of this time is a patchwork of wildly different places and people - the familiar juxtaposed against the new and strange. Trying to remember all the places I've been and things I've done is like trying to remember all the elements of a dream I've recently awoken from.

Yesterday morning I woke up on my futon in Los Angeles, and my mom told me that I would have to drive us to Phoenix. This morning, I woke up on a couch in Phoenix, visited my dying grandfather, and spent the afternoon and early evening watching lightning strike across the horizon. Then dinner. Then more lightning. At about midnight, lightning began to strike every several seconds for an hour. I have never seen anything like it. I also saw my grandfather burst into tears at the mention of a name the significance of which is unknown to me, but even though I have never seen that before either, I prefer to remember the lightning.

I watched it for hours.