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

Blog Every Day August: 8/7

In two weeks I will be a college student and a six hour drive from my current home. In two weeks I will leave my mom, the one person who has never forsaken me. I feel as though this movement will displace me somehow; I shan't exist any longer. In two weeks all of this will be gone.

This waiting game is one I have known all too well, yet its compass now dips into uncharted territory. This waiting game has never ended before. Now the countdown once set at a trickle pace hurtles toward an end I cannot imagine fully.

New belongings have slowly overtaken a corner of my room as the summer has progressed. I haven't yet had the heart to disassemble that which I already own and use regularly. Instead I create list upon list of to-dos with the frustrated knowledge that for all my planning there will be something I forget or cannot obtain until I am immersed in a new location.

I sit quietly, suspended and numb in the knowledge that I will soon be gone.

I haven't cried enough. I haven't written enough. I haven't... enough.

I will never be ready. Maybe this is what burns the most.