Lilly

From the moment I arrive home, I’m already itching as if bug-bitten. An intoxicating combination of new travel gear and heaps of outdated possessions from my previous year at school are making me anxious—not necessarily to leave home again, but to get to where I’m going. A new place. A new room. A new schedule. Altogether a fresh start.

My mother doesn’t know what to make of it. I worry that she thinks I’m just trying to get away again. The truth of it is that I spent all summer feeling trapped; by my work, by the limitations of being in a new place only temporarily, by the mountains rising up starkly on every side. Now I’m home, where the air is thick and the katydids sing me to sleep and the land is flat, so flat that I look at it and feel like I could run without limits. And that’s all I can do, these first couple of days. My plane home touched down and I hit the ground running right alongside it.

It will wear off soon. I’d give it only a few days before the adrenaline wears off; my brain sets a far more furious pace than my tired body can. I need to catch up on my sleep, eat my parents’ cooking and all the blackberries off of the bushes in our yard. Once the dust settles, I’ll be able to better enjoy my time at home.

Part of it, I think, comes from genuinely looking forward to the coming semester. My calendar is colorful with classes and meals and large, satisfying blocks of empty time, ready to be filled with studying or reading or running or whatever I choose to make of them. I thought I might feel fear going into this one, but I don’t! A modicum of apprehension, maybe—add/drop week is quite the experience, and even if I keep my current schedule, there will be no lack of hard work ahead of me—but not fear. I like research, once I get involved enough, but I miss classrooms. I miss learning for the sake of learning, not for the stack of neat plots and images that need to be in my advisor’s inbox in 48 hours. They both have their place, but I don’t like going too long on one without the other. At least for now.

But for the immediate “now,” I will take my leave of the work that I’ve done this summer. I’ll eat and sleep do everything I’ve neglected these past ten weeks, my eyes always tired, jeans looser on my frame than they’ve been in years. I’ll go to yoga with my mom, I’ll crank out some miles with my best friend in the hot damp air of the early morning. I’ll see soccer games. I’ll see a solar eclipse! I’ll miss the mountains soon, but right now I have a whole month of Midwest summer and whatever I want to make of it. I haven’t had this kind of opportunity in ages. ♦