Lilly

I leave the house just before 6 AM. This time it is by choice. I run with my body loose except for one hand, tightly wrapped around my phone; but for once I’m not tracking distance, or time, or heart rate, or anything that quantifies the activity and forces it into a guise of productivity. I just run. It’s slow and it’s not productive. My ankle hurts at first, but the pain dies away as I ease my body into the run, like I would into a hot bath. The morning is cool but humid. Sweat runs down the line of my back. I stop, sometimes, to take pictures of the sun rising through the trees or raccoons caught guilty and out of place in the daylight. I slow to a walk and talk into my phone’s camera for five or six minutes. I tell it stories about the playgrounds I pass and the old house I used to live in and the kid I liked down the street. Then I start running again. I am on the home stretch, and I sprint, and it feels good.

I go ziplining on a course I’ve done before with my cousins. The lines seem simultaneously shorter and slower than they used to be, the height no longer stunning me as I pass over copses and gullies and fields of stubby grass.

My roommate texts me! She’s from a place where there are mountains and forests and clear blue skies, so I send her a photo of the cornfields just outside of town, as flat as flat can be, morning haze blending sky to tassels at the horizon line. The only forests we have are wind farms, I tell her. It’s a good thing we aren’t going to school where I live.

I put on music as loud as it will go and clean my room from top to bottom. That means emptying my closet and pulling dust bunnies of all sizes out from under my bed. My college life begins to take a material shape in the crates littering my room, some empty, some already filled with clothes and items that will be essential once I get there. It’s hard to remember sometimes that I’m not just going off to summer camp, that I’ll actually be living in some tiny box of a room, that anything I might need had better go on the shopping list before I leave. In less than three weeks. But then, I got really excited about my new laundry detergent just the other day. Is adulthood really that far off? ♦