note: this is super ramble-y. I tried to organize it but I'm not the greatest at explaining things so I start but then I over-explain and then move on and my writing is bad and awkward and it might not even matter because I don't know who I still have on friends lists here and who still checks this but whatever I just needed to get it down somewhere. So, yeah.

Just over a year ago I graduated school and moved home. I was really unhappy with my life. I'd had a pretty shit year. I got rejected for a Fulbright and I didn't even try in any of my classes senior year. I wrote my senior thesis in about 40 hours. It was three weeks late and half the minimum length it should have been. I barely graduated, and fake smiled my way across a stage to accept my diploma. I felt like I had wasted a bunch of time in college, changing my major constantly, not knowing what I wanted to study, and settling for a major that I don't think I ever really liked at a school that I knew for a fact I hated. I went home, applied for a bunch of crappy part-time jobs I felt that I was over-qualified for &got rejected from a lot of them (some I never even heard back from). I spent six months like that, not doing much other than moping around the house.

Then I applied for (and later got) this internship and all of that changed.

About six months ago, my parents drove me out to this little house in Harbor City, about 20 miles south of LA. There, I met about two dozen other interns, many of whom are my favorite people in the world. We spent six weeks living together, going to the office to book and to train and it was really intense, especially after over a year of not pushing myself or challenging myself to do anything. More than once I sat in my bed, crying to my mom or my sisters or whoever on the phone, wondering if I should just give up. For whatever reason, I didn't, for which I am incredibly glad. At the end of six weeks, 15 of us, split into five groups of 3, packed up our vans and hit the road. That was my internship: we were called Nomads, and we spent most of the semester traveling across the US and Canada, giving presentations on the human rights crisis in North Korea.

These aren't really the things that I started this post to talk about, though. I started this post because of Heartland.

A month ago today, there was an accident and we lost three Nomads. Three amazing, loving, selfless individuals that I was so, so, so lucky to know. It was right at the end of tour, the last Monday we would spend on the road. We were all supposed to be back at the intern house Wednesday night and back in the office Thursday morning. Instead, the last few days of tour were canceled. But the details of the accident, the week and a half of debrief, and the weeks that have followed aren't why I started, either. Mostly I started because I wanted to sort through something else: the rest of tour. Almost as soon as we got back to the house, the office interns started asking how tour was, and since I've been home this last week family and friends have been asking.

My first thought is always Heartland, the team that we lost. This is probably because it's how tour ended for everyone. Suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically. So first I think of the accident, and then I think of the times that I ignored Karo's texts and sent half-assed replies hours later (and how much I cried when Nat and Drea told me how excited she always was to hear from me). I think of how they wanted to meet up with us in Texas but we didn't want to go 2 hours out of the way, and how much i wish we had just sucked it up and gone and seen them for the last time. I think of all the things I wanted to talk to Calvin about, and how I put it off because we were too busy for long phone calls. Over the last few weeks, though, I've been remembering other things. Like that time in Tennessee that there was an ice storm and the van was frozen shut, or like the time in Virginia that we met up with Northeast, or that time we randomly found an ostrich farm and fed goats and donkeys and prairie dogs and learned that ostriches are evil.

Tour was a lot more than the accident. I'm starting to remember, and now I'm afraid I'll forget.

Life on the road was tough. Driving across the country and back with two teammates who started off as strangers, staying in strangers' homes, meeting new people every day, giving presentations, tabling on college campuses, along with all the smaller, back-end things we had to do to keep tour running.... it was exhausting. Exhausting and challenging, but also exhilarating and indescribably awesome.

I've decided I want to go through the last few months and write them down, if only so that I'll start to remember some of the other things about tour. I'm not sure where I'm going to do this.. maybe here, or maybe on the blogger I made before tour launched specifically to write stuff in (whoops) or maybe not even online, maybe I'll go out and buy a journal and write it all down there. idk yet, all I know is that I want to write. I want to be able to look back on tour and remember more than just how it ended.