It's coming home after a rainy day—your stomach more than aware that the Mini Wheats you forced into it at 7 in the morning were not sufficient enough to abate severe pangs of afternoon hunger (though you always think they'll be enough because they're, like, wheat, you know?)—and closing your umbrella to pass through the threshold, reopening it again to let it dry out on the living room floor, and realizing that you don't have roommates, and you can go cook a pot of macaroni because someone hasn't used your pot without your permission and neglected to wash it, and the kitchen sink is empty because you washed the only dishes being used in the house yourself, yesterday, and no one has dirtied them up again, and when the macaroni's done you sit on the couch and eat that cheesy ocean of orange straight out of the pan...because you don't want to have to wash more dishes.
It's watching your little brother begin his last year of high school and wondering where the time went and what you've done with yours since you were in his shoes and wanting to speak with the seventeen year-old version of yourself and let her know that everything will turn out the way she wants it to, but differently—she doesn't need to worry—and that life will become so much richer and deeper for her but she should still enjoy being home and soak it up as much as she can before she leaves, because she will miss it dearly, and wishing you had an older version of yourself sitting beside you right now to tell you the same thing.
It's meeting up with old friends after two years apart and marveling how your lives, once so identical in experience and purpose and timing, are now vastly different in every conceivable way and you almost don't know what to say because you're traveling in different directions in completely different currents—some farther downstream than others—in canoes that no longer look so similar, but you do know what to say because somehow, each of your unique, individual stories were woven together at one point in the past and that moment was enough, and you're grateful the tapestry of your life will always include some of the same threads that are woven in theirs.
It's waking up to the alarm blaring in your left ear—that you've been setting to go off earlier and earlier with the supposed plan that you will get out of bed really early and therefore never feel rushed in the morning (and you're 2 for 12 so far in actually accomplishing that)—and snoozing the alarm to snuggle up to your favorite person, and have him, in his sleep, turn over and wrap his arm around you in the darkness and being enveloped in his smell and close enough to touch your nose to his shaggy, desperately-needs-to-be-cut hair, and staying in bed listening to his breathing and the droning sound of the air conditioner not because you're too tired and you need more sleep, but because you feel perfectly content in the moment and you know that as soon as you step out of bed, the day won't be as wonderful until he's back by your side again.
It's having an utterly dismal, gray sort of day, where you wonder what you're doing with your life and you feel disenchanted—you actually consciously decide on your walk home that that's the perfect word to explain how you feel—with your routine and with school and everything seems pointless and exhausting and tedious and you want to just hightail it out of there and do something different and exciting, and then waking up the next day and having an enthralling, vibrant day, where you're intellectually stimulated in each of your classes and all of the material starts to meld together and you come to a moment of understanding and that makes you happy and you feel so excited to be listening to such interesting discussions, and you never want to leave because you're genuinely worried that once you leave school you'll never make such interesting connections or think as deeply about literature as you do when your professors explain it to you and you'll just read things the rest of your life without truly understanding them, but regardless of how sad that thought is to you, your attitude changes and you're suddenly perfectly fine with where you're at and what you're doing.
It's writing incredibly long sentences because you know you can't write this way in the assignment you should be doing right now, but you simply felt like doing it and sometimes, writing when you're truly feeling is the best thing you can do.
I would argue it's the only way to write.
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