signs of life.

Hello.

Contrary to popular belief, I actually haven't died. Also, I still write blogs. Just...only less often.

This is what I am listening to outside my window,


I am being serenaded by a cacophony of cricket creativity. The cicadas take the bass section while the treefrogs improvise solos on the viola and violin. Crickets add rhythm and cello and the symphony is complete. I love this sound. At the end of every kind of day, if there is cricketsong, I can find home in some corner of my heart. At sleepovers, when everybody else is asleep, and I am feeling homesick for my own bed, I'll listen for the faintest of cicada sounds. Once found, it is like a lullaby. I focus my whirling mind on their steady, sweet voices, and I can sleep.

Right now, the symphony song is reminding me that summer is lingering in the foyer. Her weathered hand is poised and waiting on the knob as she prepares to step out of our lives once more. With eyes filled with visions of cooler winds and falling leaves, we turn readily from her long goodbyes to look into the wide open future; but summer is not gone yet. She's singing her warm-weather lullabies to me every night, still. And although I delight in the sound of it, I am so ready for autumn to walk through my door.

It is the transition that gets me every time.


My favorite days of the year are always those in-between days when summer unfolds into autumn, or when winter breathes out the first fragrances of spring. You walk outside expecting the suffocating closeness of the summer heat, but are instead greeted by a wind that feels like change. You can taste the tension of the seasons. My life feels this way today, only less divine and more....difficult.

I can taste the tension of the new colliding with the old. I can feel myself being confronted with anxieties and ominous foreshadowings that I've not yet faced. I walk outside the door of my heart and find...change.

Today was a hard, good day.
School was the good part.

The rest of it was just plain tough.


Even at school, I felt the bigness of the world into which I am leaping. I felt the awkward grinding of consistency against uncommon experience. I had the life-saving friendships of Steph and Olivia there to keep me from completely overloading, but nothing can really save you from how cold the water is on the first jump.

It just is.


I am okay with this. I just don't know everything, and I feel like I am coming unwound.


Anyway.

Remarkable Things Concerning Today:

1. I left my house at 8:40AM, and still walked in late to my 10AM class. Commuting is such adult business. I want to fly to school.

2. I didn't eat or drink for eight hours, approximately. I worked for most of the duration of that time. I'm just sayin', when you don't eat for that long and all you do is work and drive in between...you don't even realize you're hungry until you suddenly become aware that you seem have no blood sugar. Like, at all.

3. I worked for the first time. This was bittersweet.

4. I locked my keys in the car. Again.

5. I made the guy at the gas station smile. By being honest! He asked how I was and I told him I was tired. He said he was about the same. But he seemed genuinely happy to be having authentic human contact. That was nice. :)

I'm sure there were other things. Like how I talked to my boyfriend on the phone or how I pulled my first Hotlanta traffic driving stunts. But I am a sleepy sheep. Thanks for reading. Sweet dreams, world.