As my last couple of Odyssey articles may show, I've been thinking about the future a lot... probably too much considering the amount of other things on my plate far more deserving of my immediate attention. However, lately, I've found it impossible to make it through the day without thinking about whether everything I'm doing -- all the classes I'm taking and extracurriculars I'm involved in -- is moving me in the right direction. What months of pondering my future have resulted in is nothing but a far too idealistic plan of what I intend to do upon graduating:

Of course, I'll eventually return home. After a year of driving not just cross-country but up-country and down-country, working at the occasional diner or dollar store, talking to anyone who will stop long enough to tell me where they hail from and why they landed here, home will undoubtedly be nice… maybe even necessary.

I trust that upon my return to San Francisco, I might not look the same, might be a little skinnier, or a little bit tanner and even broader, in terms of collected experiences, of course. I will have spent the past year predominately on foot, so as to better familiarize myself with the towns of the people I talk to and the settings of the stories I document… also because spare change for gas will most likely be a rarity. My car will boast a little less than 200,000 miles, and besides its occasional reluctance to turn on, it always bends to my will eventually. My car and I, we will have seen it all.

I’ll have twenty-three notebooks, each page home to a new story. The folders behind each front cover will be full of crumpled receipts and Post-Its, on one of which I will have written that waitress in Oklahoma’s recount of her divorce. In big letters at the top it says, “Life presses down a bit” because that is the last thing she will have said before realizing she’d subconsciously sat down at my table, pot of coffee in hand, to tell me how she ended up waitressing in Shawnee.

On the passenger floor of my car will be the packaging from bungee cords I bought at a Louisville hardware store. Talking to the owner while paying, he will have said something I desperately needed to write down. Reflecting on his career in construction, he stops and looks hard at me, saying, “Listen, now is the time to work with your head so you don't have to work with your back.” He’s in his 60's and fading, preparing to retire after a long life of using his back.

Of course, I’ll make it home. Once I’ve acquired my trunk full notebooks, I will coax my beat up Ford westward, where I’ll return to the warmth of my parents’ arms and the comfort of my childhood bed. I will sit down in the familiar chair at my desk and begin to rhythmically tap the year I have just lived into the keys of my computer. I’ll cover those thousands of miles to make it home eventually. But for now, these miles are full of untold stories, unheard voices, and other things.