Blog Every Day August: 8/25

It's after nine on a Thursday night and I sit on a bench outside the library. It's still warm, still somewhere in the 90s Fahrenheit, but night brings a soft comfort to the heat. Across an expanse of sidewalk a fountain sprays water up, up, up. People are still out and about; a bicyclist passes by, then another.  Some twenty yards away a boy pushes his comrade on a hanging bench.

Shadows are cast in all the right places as people walk, occasional voices muffled against the blanket of dark. The fountain is a rush on which I can focus, almost worth the sweat.

I like these benign trappings of night, this handful of minutes in which I can quietly watch and breathe.

I never imagined this far. College was the final point on the map, the destination as far as I could reasonably see. Now that I am here I find myself floundering, overwhelmed and broken all at the same time. Emotions sing as they rocket up and plummet at an unpredictable, incomprehensible pace.

I have yet to grasp this new reality.

Days until college: -4