The Way Things Change

I have always struggled with the passing of time. It is not something I enjoy. I think this started my sophomore year of high school, when Christmas stopped feeling like Christmas and started feeling like a compilation of memories of how Christmas used to be. I want time to pass slower. I don't want anything else, unless its a picture album, to feel like a compilation of memories. I never understood the rush to grow up, anyway. I like living in the moment, and when a moment inevitably passes, I tend to cling to it. It creates a weird sensation; a preemptive nostalgia. I felt this way as my sophomore year ended, as my summer of renting cars drew to a close. It's beginning to creep back in, even as just two months of being abroad slips by.  And usually this sense of nostalgia, this longing for a time that has not yet passed, makes me feel like my small little universe is spinning off its axis. I'm left grasping at a moment that slips away into the past, without me ever having a chance of holding it longer than it's given to me for. But right now? Right now my world feels slow. For the first time in years, I feel like I have the time to fully exploit every second of everyday. Time, instead of whizzing by, has become slow; slow like a lazy Sunday afternoon; slow like the flicker of a candle in a drafty old room; slow like the way we used to wake up on a snow day after our parents had snuck in and shut off our alarm.

First semester of my senior year, I was enrolled in my first ever writing class. It's funny, people always seem surprised when they learn I, The Lit Major, didn't take AP English or AP Lit. But if I had, I never would have been exposed to two of the most influential courses I've ever taken in my academic career. People don't realize you don't always need to choose the hardest path to get somewhere. You shouldn't shy away from a challenge, but do what feels right, and trust that the rest will fall into place. Not much in this world happens by chance, and that is something I firmly believe. Maktub. (If you haven't read the Alchemist, please do).

This course was designed to help us with our college essays, but I'd finished mine over the summer, because my mother is my mother and she loves me but hates how much I procrastinate. Bless her for putting up with me. Being done with my essay, however, just meant that I had more time to focus on the other assignments we were given. 

They were interesting, and unlike any prompts I had encountered before. I remember one in particular; we had to choose a song we associated with a memory, and write an essay about that memory and how the song tied in. On the day it was due, we each got to read our essay out to the class while our song played in the background. There is only one thing in this world I hate more than public speaking, and that's public speaking something personal I've written. 

It's only saving grace was that it incorporated music, which sometimes still feels like my only saving grace when the world gets overwhelming. But to talk about your favorite songs and why it is your favorite is to bare part of your soul, and I was about to do so in front my unreceptive high school peers.

This assignment was my hell. 

But despite what my study habits reflect, I've always been a good student and I definitely wasn't the type to blow off an assignment. So I wrote. And I wrote about a The Lumineers song called 'Slow It Down'. I'd made a lantern the previous year in my ceramics class with the lyric "Some love was made for the lights" engraved on it. I've never quite known why, but something about that song has always clung to me. That lantern is still one of my proudest accomplishments, and it's not even that good, but it just encapsulates me as a junior so completely: I look at it and I feel like I'm looking at a kiln-fired version of who I was four years ago. 

I chose 'Slow It Down' for reasons I still don't know, and I can't even really remember what I wrote about in that essay. It had to do with getting my license, with driving a lot and spending a lot of time thinking to the soundtrack of my Spotify. I think I found solace in the plea to slow 'it' down, 'it' being life. My senior year had rapidly come and would soon rapidly go, and I would once again be left reeling. 

It's funny, how cyclical life can be. If I were to be given the same assignment tomorrow, I would write about the same song. But instead of talking about driving and thinking, I would talk about writing about this song for a class three years ago, and how very different the meaning of slowing down has become.

***

My dad sent me a quote via email my freshman year, as my dad does, from the famous journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It read, "Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a ride!'" This, also, I clung to, immediately adding it to the monstrous pile of virtual sticky notes I have saved on my laptop. I would think about it from time to time, ask myself if I was really living in a way that would produce this end result. But I realized I have a hard time measuring things in lifetimes, as I can barely function from minute to minute. 

As fate would have it, I stumbled upon a different quote that boiled this same concept down to the day to day: "And at the end of the day, your feet should be dirty, your hair messy, and your eyes sparkling." I'm not sure who said this, but thank you Universe for them. 

I didn't realize that by attempting to adhere to living life by this advice, which seemingly tells us to live life a little harder, a little faster, with a little more daring -- I would actually succeed in, finally, slowing it down.

***

I have very few obligations here. Because of that, and because I am the Earth's largest slug-person, I didn't do a whole lot with my days after I settled in. And while it was relaxing at first to sit around and do nothing except troll Facebook and watch the shittiest movies I could find on Netflix,  it becomes very boring, very fast. I felt my brain melting, and a false sense of loneliness begin to set in.

I say false because I feel that too often people throw out the world lonely as a substitution for feeling uncomfortable being alone. But that is not what it means to be lonely. Lonely is the feeling of missing someone who you cannot reach, the feeling of longing for a person or a place that will never be again. Whether this is missing someone who has passed away, or missing the way someone once was, the way you two once were together, the time and place and self that this person represents. It's watching the show you always watched together, alone. It's seeing something that reminds you of them, but not being able to share it with them. But it is not the act of simply missing people you will soon again see, nor of simply being alone. 

I miss home, and I miss my friends, but I am not lonely. I'm not lonely because I have spent far too much of my time making sure that I have the friendship of the one person who will never be away from me: myself. I have never known great loss in my life, and for that I feel thankful. It has allowed me to be the wanderer that I've always been, and to do so with no need for anyone else. Everyday I evaluate what it is I need to do, what it is I want to do, and what it is I am actually going to do. The most time I spend by myself, the more I like my own company (and this is becoming dangerous because I've never been the type to lack confidence). I've been trying to focus on feeding my soul, which sounds cliche, because it is, but is also something very real and very important. I spend hours reading; the things I've been meaning to read, random things I pick up while wandering around, which I also spend hours doing. I write without purpose and without deadline and for no one but myself and with no purpose but to pass the time, which I can seemingly not run out of. I've learned that there is little better way to learn about the world and those in it than to simply watch them be. 

I'm in so little of a hurry, I've actually started arriving places on time. Yesterday I was even early. Me! Early! Has the Earth stopped spinning completely? 

I imagine this kind of existence isn't sustainable. Eventually I may grow tired of my own thoughts, or of taking the long way to get somewhere, or of working on my cursive (which I'm doing in hopes of someday having legible handwriting, because my print is a lost cause). These things may not sound outwardly adventurous, but there are two way to adventure: in the world, and of it. A physical adventure cannot be successful or nearly as rewarding without first daring to know yourself and your relation to the world that surrounds you. Again, The Alchemist, read it, I'm begging. 

Not unlike old times, I'm beginning to feel that dread of this semester ending and of going back to AU: of transitioning from 3 classes and 12 hours of sleep a night to 6 classes, a job, an internship (prayers are welcome), extracurriculars and sleeping 5 hours a night, optimistically. 

But I've consulted with myself, and we decided none of that matters. Because it's wishing away the future or holding too tightly to the present that sends the world wobbling on its axis. And I've made a promise that for at least the next two months I will take this beautiful wonderful life at the pace it sets for itself. I'll take it as fast at it will go or at a nice steady trot. Hell, I'll take it in freeze frame milliseconds if thats what will be. 

I'm embracing this time for the luxury it is, and I'm trying desperately not to look forward or back, but just to look around. Too many people are wishing away their abroad experience by enjoying themselves too much and dreading the end, or focusing on the negative too strongly and dreading every day that it drags on.

I'm doing neither.

For once, I'm taking it slow, in hopes that when this wild ride is over, my feet will be dirty, my hair messy, and my eyes remain sparkling for years and years to come.   

The Long Way Home - An Edinburgh Inspired Short Story // Long Vingnette

It had finally gotten cold, but only about three days ago, so she hadn’t yet been convinced this was actually the beginning of the U.K. winter she’d been warned about. She pulled her leather jacket around her a little tighter, and put as much of her hands as would fit in the small zipper pockets. She lived just on the outskirts of town, but she didn’t mind the walk. It gave her time to think, when she was in a thinking mood, which she most often was, and tonight. Most of the time she thought about her day, about her resolutions for the next (to leave her bed before noon, to be on time to class, to smile at a stranger, to write a bloody sentence, to not be a bumbling American idiot in front of the Sainsbury’s cashiers, etc.).

Sometimes she thought about her family, about how much she missed her Mom’s dinners and hugs and lists, in that order, and her Dad’s stories: the conviction in his voice whenever he told them. She caught herself from time to time, whenever she was reading out loud, trying to emulate the dips and dives, the sincerity in every syllable that she’d learned from him. She missed her sister, but over their years apart she’d become easier to miss. Not because she loved her less or missed her less, but because her heart had grown used to being physically separated from the person who understood her best.

Tonight, she was thinking about the city. She was thinking about the cobblestones under her feet. She was thinking about how much lovelier the streets would be if the trees were burning like they did back home. Nonetheless, she loved them.

It was this sense of singularity that catalyzed the process. She never loved anything before she left it. Or at least, she could never recognize it for the love that it was. But when she returned from a short weekend trip, just days ago as the cold was settling over the city, she felt a sense of returning to somewhere near to feeling like home. As she walked and reacquainted herself, she found she had missed the hills they liked to call streets (always uphill, remarkably). Her ears had grown accustomed to the cold; the frost had restored her to the former snow enthusiast she was, before DC winters eroded that version of herself away.

Once she let herself love bits and pieces, the rest came in a rush: The effortless combination of modern and medieval buildings; the way the sunshine scared away the cold as soon as it came out from behind the clouds; the way people could never make up their mind about which side of the sidewalk to walk on. This usually would drive her insane, but here she was just as confused as the rest of them and had come to love the little side step shuffle dance with strangers. They were always kind, shouting ‘cheers’ after her when they finally managed to brush past.  Even the homeless were extremely polite, despite if she could spare them any change. Plus, many of them had dogs. She liked the idea that a sense of companionship could make someone so many degrees warmer, even when they had many reasons (including the weather) to be cold.

“I need to buy a scarf”, she thought, if only to get the damn weather off her mind.

But the universe had different plans for that evening, and as she reached the Quartermile, it began to rain. She did love the rain, though there never had been a solution for her hair in such circumstances. Umbrella’s weren’t the answer, since the rain didn’t fall, but rather formed a ball of mist around her as she strode on.

As she did, she passed two other girls who hadn’t yet hung up their leather jackets for the season, and she felt better about holding out hope for a few more sunny late summer days, even as mid-October charged in head on at her full force.

She crossed the Meadows, noting for the millionth time (probably) that the scene from the Wizard of Oz with the scary apple trees could probably have been inspired by the very path she had to walk each night. She decided this place was a lot like Oz, everything either grand or green, as long as you substituted munchkins for folks on bikes.

She was nearing the end of the paved path now, preparing her ankles to take on the cobblestone in heels for the last time today. Her flat was only 3 more minutes’ walk, but she hadn’t quite finished her thinking for the night.  Unsure, really, of what she was thinking around, it didn’t much matter. She knew the moment she opened the door the fluorescent lights would scare away any ideas like flashlights in a bat cave.

She did love her flat. It had beautiful arches in the doorway, a meticulously tiled floor foyer and a smart vestibule that kept out that damned chill in the air. Her door was large and wooden, carved with care (and symmetrically, which was more important). It possessed a big golden 3 in the center, and a knocker beneath. The knocker was next to useless, because directly behind the door was a staircase that took you up two levels to the kitchen, and another two to the bedrooms. You wouldn’t be heard unless you buzzed up, and even then there was still a slight chance.

Anyway, it was this time of night that all her flat mates were home, buzzing about in preparation for their tomorrows’ as well. They were kind people. Well intentioned, respectful. She even considered one a friend. But it was nothing like coming home. Her room was her safe haven from the world, as it had been her whole life. But she liked open windows and open doors in her home. Leaving just the window open, without the neutralization of the hallway air, was proving to complicate the perfect balance between the biting wind and the burning (ancient) radiator that lined her eastern wall.

Behind that marvelous wooden door there were many good things: the first kitchen of her very own with left over mashed potatoes in the fridge; Magnum chocolate peanut butter ice cream bars in the freezer; a bottle of her favorite wine, unopened; in her room, her quilt, which remained as well traveled as she was, and freshly washed linens lay snugly tugged around her bed. But all the fresh blankets and ice cream in the world wouldn’t make up for what was lacking; the warm welcomes, the comfortable intimacy that comes with living with loved ones, family and friends alike. The sense of being home, on a smaller scale. Being so familiar with a person, you can identify who has come home by the sound of their footsteps or the jingle of their keys; knowing how their day has gone by the playlist that has begun to waft out from under their door.

And so, that’s what she finally found herself thinking about as she rounded the corner of her block. Gazing up to the second story, she caught shadows flickering in the candle light in the kitchen’s giant wooden windows (another thing she absolutely adored). But as she neared the gate, she kept her eyes steady on to the next building.

She thought she would go for a few more blocks, maybe find a few more scary apple trees to paint with burning browns in her mind. Putting a few more minutes of cobblestone under her feet, she held onto the well-nigh feeling of home they gave her. Maybe when she got back she would sit down and try to figure out her bloody radiator. Her room would be far too stuffy with both the door and window shut, which lately had been more and more frequently the case. If the cold really were settling in, it didn’t leave her much time to find that illusive balance.

       “Yes, that’s a good plan for tomorrow”, she thought. But tonight, she would take the long way home.