Dear Francesca,

I am always longing, yearning, looking towards the future. Not in a sense of setting goals for the days to come or for my life in general, but in that I have a mindset of once I am through with the current stage of life, then my life can truly begin, then I will be happy.

In high school I couldn't wait to escape. I wanted away from my town, the people who surrounded me. I imagined college as a place of finding friends who understood me and having deep conversations with them into the late hours of night. When I got to college, I found friends but we didn't sit around talking of the meaning of life and other grand topics all the time (now I realize how grandiose that sounds and I am not quite as idealistic now either; I am content in the conversation of everyday matters). I found that people were very much into partying, and I found myself getting swept into that as well. College was a time of prolonged adolescence for me in many ways, and painful at times. I mistakenly thought that if I did well in this rigorous academic environment then I had no problems with the rest of my life. I somehow glossed over the pain until it all came to a peak in my senior year when I spun out of control in nearly every way. I look at the girl I was and feel very sad for her, the girl layered in scars trying to hold herself together.

But I am getting off of the subject, Franney. Even in college, where I thought I'd be happy, I kept yearning for something more, something else. Perhaps that yearning was to cover up things in my life I didn't want to face, partly the depression that has skulked on and off for most of my life.

And that is probably why I continued yearning in the years after. Waiting for the right job, the boyfriend, those things that would finally fulfill me. At times I seemed content and I thought I was, perhaps I was. But all through my writings I still felt the pull of what was to come, not the here and now. It took me a while to notice that theme. After a literary reading of which I was a part of, a friend remarked to me that most of my poems had a voice of one who is depressed, one who is stuck, one who is longing for something better. I had never realized that until his comment, for at the time, I was in the light, the darkness of depression was gone. That sense of yearning for the light, yearning for something more seems to stay there, even if it is transformed -- transformed into now that I'd found the life I wanted, I better hold on tight to it, celebrate it.

I find myself once again in a state of yearning. I yearn for a boyfriend who I can share my life with. I yearn for friends here in this city. I yearn for a sense of belonging, a sense of home. I want to take that yearning and use it, transform it into seeking out new people, new places. I want to shed sitting around alone and pining.

Yours,
Hannah Iona