An ordinary day

How’s your week been?

I write a lot about how my life feels, the abstract, metaphorical ramblings of how I see this world. But this is something of what it acts day to day, as a kind of ode before these days change forever.

ORDINARY DAYS

Sometimes I think that I don’t write about the ordinary day because there are so many of them. It always feels a bit cheesy to open my journal and write about what I did, preferring much more to talk about how it felt. But as this semester evaporates behind me, I’m getting nostalgic over the little things. I’m realizing that they are little moments that I will want to look back on, the ones I always love when flipping through old journals because I forgot about them. You don’t forget the big stuff, it’s the mundane, everyday stuff that falls out of reach.

But the everyday days are only mundane until it’s noteverydayyanymoree. Then it becomes crystallized as a period of life that you cannot return to, making it all a bit more romantic than it perhaps felt in real time. I didn’t used to know that. I used to run recall from things, like a kid already excited for their ninth birthday when still planning their eighth. Always ready to go. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you go anyway.

A poster came up in my Pinterest feed that said one day at a time you impatient psychopath and I found that quite hilarious, not to mention painfully appropriate for my life right now. So this is one day, recorded. One, mundane, day.

A SLICE OF MY LIFE

I’ve been known to hang out in the science quad during my breaks, for no real reason other than the fact that science nerds tend to be quiet company which makes for a conducive reading environment. And if they do speak, it’s usually in a mathematical language so foreign that my brain doesn’t even attempt to decipher it. I’ve been hanging out there, sipping mid-day coffees for years.

So today I sat down in my usual spot, the spot where I stare up at a clock in on the building and think quite dramatically about the passage of time how many hours I have spent in that very spaced how very few are left now, and the inescapability of time, the usual stuff,  when a door opened and I heard:

Are you a biology student?

I looked up to see a bright-eyed man with the kind of smile on his face that was either lethally caffeinated or just freakishly enthused with life, standing before me.

Uh, no. Haha. Literature, I just come for the peace.

I eye my small stack of books as a kind of proof. He introduces himself and goes on to tell me that he always sees me sitting there, how exposing, and that it truly is the best quad, especially with the new butterfly garden that he orchestrated the planting of. He points to the sprawling purple flowers on long vines of green and proceeds to get quiquietto the science behind cross-pollination before rushing off to class. I couldn’t help but laugh as he left, at both the thought of me being a STEM major and the nerdy enthusiasm of this total stranger. I glanced up at the door that he came cam of and realized that it was his office. Professor of Biology. Of course. No one under the age of forty-five speaks to me in that place.

It was kind of wonderful though. He was like a wizard of plants and nature, talking about the two with the same electric passion that my literature professors discuss books. College is so much like Hogwarts in that way, I swear. Everyone has their little nerdy niche to belong to.

COFFEE BREAK

When you have a break between classes, you have to get strategic so as not to go insane. I usually go to the aforementioned science quad to read for about an hour, then I venture over to my favorite coffee cart and sit in the sun for about twenty more minutes, writing before class as I watch the commotion.

The coffee cart is always an entertaining affair. It’s run by two college girls, one of whom I think hates me because one time I ordered a cappuccino over ice and it was a real fiasco for reasons I still don’t understand, but that’s another story. Today she was almost friendly so we must be getting past it. I stand under the palm trees waiting for my drink, usually looking at the sky or people stretched out on the grass like they’re on the cover of one of those college brochures, making sure to never stare at the baristas while they work because as a former barista, we hate that.

I get my coffee and sit by the business hall, which, let me tell you, is a real three-sixty from the science quad. You don’t hear about nuclear synthesis and decimal points here, but instead the raspy, surfer voices of frat boys discussing how hard that quiz was, or, more often the case, their plans for the evening, usually bumping fists with fellow frat brothers along the way. It’s highly entertaining, especially when the sorority girls join the scene and the real show of young mammals-female social interactions. As much as I loathe the social life at my school, I’m going to miss watching Jake flirt with Becky.

MIDDAY MUSINGS

I love those twenty minutes though because I get to free-write. Having just gone to class, read for an hour, and had a coffee, I’m always in a bit of a trance. I will open my class notes to an empty section in the back and start scribbling without thinking. There’s something freeing about writing on random pieces of paper as opposed to my journal. I think the receipts in the center console of my car could have some of my best work on them.

Today, I scribbled this:

“There is a premonition of love in late September’s air. Or maybe it is just love’s remembrance, I can never quite tell. It’s a feeling, but it’s also a memory. Sometimes I will look at someone and remember the love that I had for another, another time, and what that felt like. What it felt like to be so enamored with the presence of another being, to be so comforted by them just standing in front of you. How it felt like the breath was running away from my lungs. The breath was always running away from my lungs back then. It felt a bit like being born, falling into something like that for the first time. Something that I think altered the chemistry of my brain before I even knew what was happening.”

A ladybug landed on me as I sat there in the sun. I finished my coffee and went to class. I took notes and stared at the palm trees pushing against the window panes. I walked down the stairs, past the fall leaves, and got into my car. I thought of how many more times I have had to do that before never coming back. One day at a time you impatient psychopath.

Love always, m.

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