My Body

My body is my home.
It houses my soul and every part of who I am.
Like a house, it is my decision to decorate it and make it comfortable as I like.
It is up to me to take care of it with regular maintenance.
I must keep it safe, and protect it from anyone who may desire to harm or invade it.

My body is strong.
It presses on through the pain when I push it one more mile.
It does not fail me when subjected to late nights with research papers and caffeine.
It holds me up when I work on my feet eight continuous hours a day.

My body is fidgety.
It grows restless after several mundane hours spent in lecture halls.
My fingers start to tap in rhythm when my attention span has dwindled.
My leg shakes when my body wants to move about, but I will not let it.

My body is alert.
The little hairs on my neck tell me when there may be danger.
My heart speaks only to me when something is not right.
My stomach tells me who I should avoid.

My body is tired.
It collapses into my bed at the end of a long day.
My eyelids droop shut when my body requires sleep more than Netflix.
My arm drowsily finds its way again to my alarm clock every morning.

My body is resilient.
My shins scream at me in agony after a long run.
My back joins in unison after standing for too long.
But my body quiets the aching parts like crying children, and carries on.

My body is beautiful.
From my eyebrows to my toenails and every other part in between.
Even the parts others would prefer to change.
It is beautiful because it simply is -- and I let it be.

My body is dynamic.
It changes day to day, every time a new hair grows on my legs.
It looks different today than how it did yesterday, and how it will tomorrow.
It may lose or gain weight, and my skin may become freckled or tan.

My body is powerful.
It can command the attention of a room simply by being present.
It could create and nurture new life if I allowed it.
It is able to do many astonishing things.

My body is free.
It answers to nobody, not even to me.
It does as it pleases and its only regard is for safety and pleasure.
It mirrors the soul it harbors.

My body is opinionated.
It lets me know when I put something in it which it does or does not like.
It informs me with no delay that something was a bad idea.
It reports back just as quickly when I have done something to please it.

Above all the things it may be, it is certain only one constant:
My body is my own.
Only those whom I allow may touch it.
Only that which I believe may motivate me to alter it.

Its appearance is a direct consequence of what is done to it.
What is done to it is an effect of how the soul inside of it feels about it.

My body is worthy of love and respect and security and pride.
Certainly from everyone else, but most importantly, from myself.
This much will always true.

Welcome To New York (Boston).

I was driving to work last week, weaving through busy rush hour traffic on Rock Road. Taylor Swift's 1989 CD was absentmindedly playing as background noise in my stereo, as it has been since the album dropped last October. I was preparing to spend the next several hours begrudgingly earning $7.50 an hour around co-workers whom I didn't like, and customers whom I liked even less. I wasn't exactly in the brightest of moods. Then, through the haze of my own bad attitude, I heard good ol' T-Swift crooning to me the words I needed to hear, like she's done hundreds of times before.

You see, I have a dream. Many dreams, in fact. But the dream currently responsible for the high in my life is one about travel, one about adventure and freedom and finding myself. Like many young people before me, I yearn to leave my safe, familiar comfort zone and get wonderfully lost in a new, giant, mesmerizing place, eventually making it my own.

And since the day I bought it three months ago, I have been all too aware of that plane ticket to Boston with my name on it.

I'll be heading east on a grand, new exploit of my own, in as little as twenty-seven days from now. That's the dream that's been fueling my passion through the mundane activities of two summer jobs and three summer classes since the middle of May. What has filled my sails with wind as the days dwindle away is anticipating the joy I will experience during my short four-day caper in the city that will hopefully soon be my home.

So last week when I heard Taylor Swift's lyrics in the song she wrote about her love for New York City, even after hearing them and mindlessly humming along to them time and time again for months on end, I paused. I thought about the gravity of her words.

"Like any great love, it keeps you guessing

Like any real love, it's ever-changing

Like any true love, it drives you crazy

But you know you wouldn't change anything, anything, anything"

I have been a dedicated T-Swift fan since "Teardrops on My Guitar". I was there for Taylor when she was just a sixteen-year-old girl who lived in Nashville and wore cowboy boots and sundresses to the Academy of Country Music Awards. I remember when she said that Nashville was her home, furthermore, that country music was her home; and that she'd never dream of cutting her hair or moving to a big city like NYC or LA. Well, well... how things change.

"Welcome To New York" is Taylor's declaration about how she fearlessly fell in love with a city, with its people, and with the experience itself. And, like any Taylor Swift song, she is vividly painting a picture of it as one huge, beautiful love affair. Taylor Swift is in love with a city. And why not? A city is just as full of human emotion as the people who inhabit it.

These lyrics are the ones that spoke out to me last week on my drive to work. They were casual and commonplace, yet they were gently reminding me to keep pushing myself toward whatever it is that draws me in, to whatever feels right to me.

You see, love comes in many forms in this lifetime. And heaven knows I'm a sucker for falling in love with new places. It's been barely over a year since the Travel Bug bit me, and the virus has only been incubating and growing stronger within me this long; it has not been dormant or forgotten.

Travel will surely keep you guessing, much like life itself. How am I to know what lies around the corner for me? How am I supposed to find out, if I'm never brave enough to take the steps necessary to arrive at the corner in the first place?

Travel is certainly ever-changing, most obviously by the number of possible destinations one could choose to explore and make their own.

And travel is definitely enough to drive a person crazy, especially those of us who so quickly get emotionally attached to people and places, with little foresight for the consequences we will inevitably face when the time comes to leave.

But I wouldn't change anything. Not one single part of the delightful, possessive, magical beauty that is creating my own home in a place faraway from anywhere I've been before.

In the few seconds it took for my copy of 1989 to play those lines, my brain and my heart merged into the same wavelength. For one fleeting moment, my mind and soul were alive with the wondrously dangerous combination of adrenaline and oxytocin that only comes from love. To people who have ever traveled before to some other place and who have instantly fallen in love with the new scenery and the new perspective of life, no explanation of Taylor Swift's love affair with New York is needed. We already understand, because the feeling is pumping through our veins with every beat of our lustful, wandering hearts.