"Wait, you are staying the night? Don't you have to come home and...sew something?"
-Amalia, trying anything she possibly can to get Celisse to not stay the night

"I didn't lose my new friend because I mentioned church, luckily. We went to dinner last night. She's a doll. Like, literally she looks like a doll."
-Kelsea

I'm weighing the pros and cons of taking a semester off. Looking at a degree audit report makes it look so smart to go this semester and just get the whole thing over with within a year, but the things that I want to get done in the next few months have overturned the decision.
This is the first Spring of my life (since I was 5 years old) that I won't be in classes. It feels so freeing. A huge weight strapped to a balloon and floating away. I have my big plans, but I also want to do projects. (I just watched Julie and Julia last night). She had such a cool thing, doing all of Julia's French Cooking recipes in a year. I don't want to overtake something so monumental, but I do want to cook and go bike-riding and hiking, and go to the dentist actually, and work on art that I'm always thinking about, and maybe practice my Spanish, and read books for enjoyment (Or preparation. I need to reread Shakespeare, and I feel like I'm behind because I've never read Paradise Lost by Milton. And I'm definitely learning that The Odyssey is central to just about everything in English Literature...)

So here's to plans, starting now. Not the New Year. Although my heart feels good about the future, and walking into open space.

We took apart the car, piece by piece, starting with the smaller ones, and moving on to the larger ones as our muscles grew bigger. Pretty soon we had a yard full of parts, and we grew bored with each other, sipping coffee and pretending.She took careful scissors to the seams of us, until we were separate pieces as well, and had nothing to drive away from the scene, since our car was parts.We erased each other from the calendars in our phones, we smiled brief smiles.
We graduated to a bottle of wine, once the sun had gone down and we were below freezing. With glasses clinking, we froze to the steps, froze in statues, looking at each other, forced to look at each other. Didn't thaw til it got warm the next days, but our hearts were beating slow, so we put the car back together but it took us hours, with intermittent breaks for calls from our bosses, or to renew our books at the library, or checking the mail and such.
It was a larger thing than us, so we sighed a lot.
Communication of sighs to each other for several days until it hurt to keep going that way. Or hurt more than it had, already. She felt a need to sew us back together. Felt a need to say sorry, but only with her eyes, and even the eyes only spoke in Spanish. We linked fingers momentarily, unwilling to admit love or sacrifice. She turned the ignition, I adjusted the rear view mirror but the car didn't start. We had more time to sit and think about what we'd done wrong, and our used books wouldn't sell, and how we had stopped taking pictures a year ago, so we couldn't remember having fun.
You do what you have to.

you keep saying that

I am in the same place that I was a year ago, for the first time in my life.
I am at the same job, same school, have mostly the same friends and enemies.
It is a very strange thing, and I don't know how I feel about it. Usually I do something drastically different every year, and while I love having a routine, I am feeling tied down, like I need to get going.

I'm just nervous and it makes me turn off my radio when I drive so I can think more.

And all of the while, I was dreaming of Revelry.
Kings of Leon

I don't think I understood until this day
the pain
of finals.


I am so excited to say goodbye to Leopold and Molly Bloom. At least for a while.

"I don't really know what's going on, why are we yelling and clapping?"
"I don't know what's going on. I just can't turn down free enthusiasm."
-me, and then Keaton's response

unsatisfied

I'm just thinking about how shifty things are, and how God wants us to be unsatisfied with the world. To long for Heaven, and oh Lord I do.

I have no reason to complain.
I have no reason not to tie up combat boots tighter and say, "Hell yes, I am a soldier, and that's how I'll go down one day."
Through a season of trouble and desperation, I am applying fresh bandages and reloading my gun.

This is all going to burn, and I don't know why I fight for it. I don't know why I worry. It's time. Time to go.

"I looked my demons in the eye, laid bare my chest, said 'do your best, destroy me.' I've been to hell and back so many times, I must admit you kinda bore me."
Ray Lamontagne