When the Spring Comes Around

I did not expect to be back so soon, telling you this.

Can we not round up and say that it has been a year since we've spoken? Can we assume that things have changed, that I am different now? I will spare you the half-botched confessions and get on with it: You and I are no longer a secret.

I have told them. They know.

I could say that it was a lie I told too perfectly or a slip of paper I hid away too quickly that gave me away. I could say that someone else told. But the truth is this: I told.

I took a writing class. I went to readings. I sent in poems. I got published. I entered a contest. I won a contest. The head of the English department stopped me on campus to personally congratulate me.

My world spun, the story has turned into something different. Now here we are. It has stopped. Click. Now they know.

I'm not going to say I won't be back here again. It's a comfort to know that As I Wrote One Day is still here when I need it. I've been back on nights when I couldn't sleep to look back at the pages. 3 years ago, 2 years ago when I only lived and told the truth when I wrote here, when I was just Some Girl and no one cared. When I thought that this was as good as it gets, to be known only a fraction through the slits of these sentences. I gave up writing and found it again. Then I gave up my secret and found the rest of me. If anyone is still reading this, please keep in touch.

I told you we'd meet again sometime.

August of last year

Someday we'll meet beyond the stars 
And it'll be away from here   
Someday we'll meet beyond the time and the bars  
And it'll be away from here
—Rilo Kiley | August
The email account attached to this blog has 526 unread emails and Blogger says I have 62 unpublished drafts. I've done as much stalling as I could but I think 3 years is a long time to be in one place.

Life is confusing. I thought that at 15 and I think that now. I have hated life and then loved it again, sometimes in the same sentence. I have wanted to escape and then wanted to stay. I may have not been eloquent or poetic or prolific here but I sure as hell have been confused.

But it was a good run. I couldn't have found a better place to record the final years of my teenagedom than the blogosphere. The kindness, the humility, the strength, the friendships that I've experienced my few years as a blogger have astounded me. A simple hello left one day in the comments has started friendships despite geography. It's been 3 years and there are still those who take the time to leave a Facebook comment or send an email simply because they want to know how I'm doing.

Those bloggers have read about my life in some way or another for almost 4 years. From inelegant and weird at 15 to cynical and cryptic at 17. As I Wrote One Day was always about me trying to hear in an environment that did its best to overpower and overwhelm. In the past 3 years, I have done things I'm proud of, things I regret, I've made decisions that broke me, threw away relationships I cherished and started ones I hated.

I've loved harder and lost more.

But it was a good run.

I've fought for my life. And I've learned how to live it.

I'm sure we'll meet again sometime.

Sum

13 hours a week is just a joke. But I tell myself to handle it, to keep going and before I pile my plate higher again and keep running through life. I tell myself to deal with it. Watching Downton Abbey at 11:30 in the dark before bed. Counting the hours until I have to be up again. 5 hours is a good night's sleep, 5 hours is a luxury. I pile everything on and eat it all. If I'm not choking it's fine I say. fine. fine. fine. I'm not choking, not yet. I'm 19, not dead. Not middle aged or married. So when you say slow down what do you mean? Slow which part? The thoughts or the goals? Because I write verse between classes and buy museum memberships between spinning carts of books up into the stacks at work before I smile and nod at advisors and professors who tell me about the importance of education and requirements in a half laid off world of the starving, displaced and abused. The requirements because they're the most important thing and graduation is the pinnacle. And I say fuck comp in my head behind teeth clenched into a smile, I say fuck comp like it's my job. Because its job security is ironclad and its expected job growth for 2015 superb. I write this here as a memory, proof that when you'll say later that I never tell you anything, I'll have this written here as plain as day: I don't care anymore. I don't care if the days start spinning like clock hands, if weeks speed by like weekends.

I just don't care at all.