soaking

Taking a break from Twilight tonight. It’s raining in Morris tonight, a soft gentle rain. And I just saw who I think was one of my friends out in it, holding up her pants, walking barefoot, soaking it up. It’s a quiet night after a meeting with next years apartments staff, a night for, I think, reflection. My time here in Morris as a student is coming to an end, but with the maddening pace of the end of the year (research paper, research presentation, Residential Life logistics) I feel like I’ve been skimming the surface off the the experience of my final days without letting it soak in, like my friend outside let the rain soak in. I sat out on the mall today with my laptop and read through the most recent draft of my research paper, and in between pages I just looked up and watched. A group was laying out in the grass, eyes closed, soaking in that sun. The weather’s getting nicer, inversely proportional to my apparent work ethic and creative drive. The research paper is not a mess, but it’s a ways from good. That’s my task tomorrow, clean that up. Tonight I’m going to work on The Beacon, and try to work toward understanding the main crux of the whole story: that a woman had a child, and then, for reasons yet unknown, faked her own death, and adopted her biological child under an assumed name. Why did she do that? I have no idea yet, but I know that she did it. She hid herself under a secret identity, but didn’t want her child, her son, to have his taken away. She did this out of love, because she couldn’t stand to be parted from her child, but, for some reason, she also could not stand to remain the person she had been. That old person had to die, had to be done away with. Her story is the center of the story, the black hole around which the galaxy of fiction spirals. But trying to get to the center of a black hole and see what’s inside is hard, impossible perhaps, but it’s a story that I have to know because it’s the reason for the rest of the story. Morris is lovely in the spring, with the wind shaking trees like slow maracas, flowers peeking up, the world is brighter, is better to live in, and it makes me not want to leave. Morris is the center of my story, the people I know, the friends I’ve made, the choices I’ve made, the love I have, all of it rotates, spirals, around this little town in the middle of somewhere. It’s a place I’ve grown into, a place I’ve set down emotional roots, it’s my home for now but not my home for ever. A friend told me that the way things work is we’ll all move on and grow into the next place and make that home, but that doesn’t ease the transplantation. But I understand and feel that my time here is drawing down to a point on the horizon; I’ve done what I came to do, and I’ve done it the best I could and now it’s time for what comes next. And what comes next is a year away, a year to center myself, to gorge myself on good books and good video games and good friends from years ago, a time to prepare to take the next stride, to find another place to put down roots, another place to call home. But all of that wishing and hoping and looking ahead subsumes the beautiful immediacy of the now, and now is where I want to be, now is what I want to do, I want to sit here in the dark looking out the window, feeling the rain-chilled air seep in through the window and watch the pools of reflected light shatter and reform with drops of rain. I want to soak in this place, draw it deep into myself, and hold a bit of it there to cherish later, to remember, to love. This place has been home, and soon it won’t be. It won’t be my home anymore, but people I love will still be here, people I will miss and visit often, but I never want to forget the time we’ve had here, together, under the same sky, soaking this place into ourselves, nourished equally by the sun and the laughs and the rain. When I am gone, I’ll carry this with me, a lasting and immortal breath of chilled spring evening air, coming off the grass that grows under the sky, and under that sky is us, will always be us.