So, hi. My name is Krystyn. I’ve been journaling online for a long while now – since 1998, actually.

I live in North Carolina – and if you had told 1998 me that I would be here, and pretty happy to be so, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.

But after living in the Chicago area (and in the city itself) my whole life, I decided to push my life in a new direction, and pursue game development as a career. That decision got me here to the Raleigh area in April of 2007.

It was a hard decision, leaving Chicago, and one that I still find myself a little conflicted over. I want to be able to have gigantic pieces of Chicago here with me – the feel of the air, the taqueria down the street, the public transportation (even though the CTA’s suffered badly since I left), etc. etc. It is frustrating sometimes, to be reminded of the things that simply don’t exist anywhere but in the 312 area code. There are many things to love here, mind you, but my habitual sense of space may never acclimate to the wide roads, the endless rolling green, the lack of significant snowfall in winter.

But no, I am here amongst the limitless swaths of pine trees, plenty of game development under my belt. And I live in an apartment complex that is suburban and staid and very, very peaceful, and very, very quiet.

I will tell you that it’s been a rough year for me (oh, 2009, how I wish you’d expire, already), in almost every aspect of my life. So rough, in fact, that I am still awakening from a heavy-lidded nightmare. I have been a zombie, trudging my way through the days and months, mechanically lurching along, marking the passage of time, but never taking time to reflect. It might be time to reflect. It just might.

What I like most about being here now, in NC, at the tail-end of 2009, is that I feel so much less apathy at forward motion. I mean, my fingers actually want to pause over the keys at typing something like, “I look forward to things now,” because, well, that’s not the truth. My sense of caution is …intense, and currently unbending. Let us just say that I am much more content than I was previously. I can type that much truthfully.

My father died, almost a year ago. I lost my dream job, a year ago yesterday. I moved from Los Angeles to here just a couple of months ago, with tiny shreds of hope for more design work in my chosen genre of gaming (Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs), but also with a grateful gladness in my heart for the folks at Epic who said they’d make room for me, if I wanted to come back.

And so I did come back.

I came back to the place and the job I left Chicago for. I came back from L.A., the city I’ve always disliked.

I have a torby cat named Squeaky, I have a degree in theatre, and I still wish I could paint or draw with any alacrity or beauty. My memories assault me at all hours of the day, and I want to be better at capturing them down, because sometimes I worry that I will forget the way that broken pavement looks in sleety rain, how the CTA bus sounds in the morning, and the taste of a Margie’s Candies ice cream sundae in the middle of winter. I even have some nostalgia over pieces of L.A., which surprises me. Each snapshot of my life are origami words folded out in intricate scenes, pressed carefully into books, volumes of these chapters, of the Me who left Chicago, of the girl who’s broken her own heart a million times.

It just might be time to reflect, at the closing of the year.