Since 2012, I’ve essentially been on the move - shitty vans, slightly nicer vans, tour busses, planes, even a ship or two. I hit the ground running and didn’t look back, unceremoniously dumping my previous life without giving much thought to where I’d end up.

That felt right at the time, and on balance it probably was, throwing myself head on into the maelstrom of unknown, instinctively realizing that if I stopped to think, the magic would somehow quiver and tendril out into nothingness, like ice on a hot sidewalk, and I wouldn’t find myself, almost seven years later, playing Rage Against the Machine with a man in a rainbow suit.

I am ostensibly wiser now, certainly older. Seasoned, let’s call it. No longer quite the wily vagabond, Nashville’s home, so much so that I even bought cacti (a big step). And yet 2012 me feels alarmingly close. Maybe the naiveté’s nostalgic. Or perhaps it’s that I’m redirecting towards a path I tried so hard to navigate back in the day, and failed.

Or, maybe, it’s a whisper from my younger self by way of the universe, saying thank you for not fucking it all up. You’re to be trusted now. So, pick up where you left off, and keep going.