Thunder and Lightening

     It's raining outside, or preparing too rain hard. It's definitely thundering and lightening like crazy. Which is nice, since I am almost as tired as I usually am on a Friday night after a week of work.

     Today I help my brother shop for things for his first apartment. His idea of "cleaning supplies" stretched to include; dish soap, clorox wipes, and toilet paper. I broadened his scope slightly. It was nice to look for all of those things again, although while I was in college I bought them all for dorm rooms, whereas his first experience of them is coming from renting an actual place. It's funny, I remember how excited I always was by the infinite possibility of the coming year. College allows you to reinvent yourself a little differently every semester if that's what you want to do. And you do want to do it, even though every time you do you tell yourself that this time it is final, you've really figured it out, and yet looking back each new version was really just a variation on a running theme. A running theme that, hopefully, upon graduation will, through a few years of self discovery, lead to the person you actually were all along. Unless my current mindset is all another alter ego, which raises a bunch of existential questions that are just too much to contemplate on a Friday night.

     I also remember not looking forward to going back to college. Whenever I read anything that I wrote back then it all seems to hurricane around a sense of displacement, of being home for only little splinters of time before returning to the grind and crowded loneliness of a college campus.

     Now of course all I see when I look back are golden afternoons with low humidity, blooming flowers in the spring, the smooth campus lawn. My classes. God I miss them. I wouldn't go back, of course, not really, but if someone gave me the opportunity to relieve a day I would definitely consult my old schedules to pick one that would hold a lecture from as many of my favorite professors as possible. And no, I am not terminally dorky. Pretty dorky, yes, but as much as I miss the material I miss a sense of purpose. When there are papers on The Tao Te Ching or the Theory of Island Bio-Geography to write, it's hard to feel like you are floating and lost.

     When I graduated I remember thinking that my whole life had been spent on a pathway, leading somewhere, clear, but fenced in. But now I found myself in a field, and I could go anywhere. I've tried to design a path through that field, but feel instead as if I am meant to discover each inch. Individually.

      But right now, tonight, I don't feel like complaining. I feel lucky. And not because I don't have to wonder how to transport eighty pounds of cleaning supplies to college in a tiny car. But because I already figured that stuff out. And it's not has hard as it looked when I was twenty.