let's call it "visceral"

I don't mean to romanticize this, but when I speed-walked down to campus yesterday on blistered feet in all black with a viola on my back listening to some emphatic Tchaichovsky, I thought man, someone outta write a book about this girl

[SHE'S A PIECE OF WORK]

This June feels vaguely cinematic, faded technicolor and VCR quality. I'm frustrated by the monotony of adolescent emotion and my inability to transcend it all; the dull throb of humanness that accompanies elbow bruises and razor scratches. What a curse, man, to bleed out through pinprick marks on our index fingers and observe the endless complacency of mind against the unending vitality of biology. We are repaired almost faster than we can break ourselves, and that, she said - running her hands through her grown-out hair and leaning forward, sneaker catching on the end of her chair leg - that's some incredible sh*t right there, the things people survive and come up kicking. She looked so deified, sitting there in her sweatshirt, a Madonna in a rehab center come to Let our trails Be, to sweep us from the droves of trial and carry us to freedom -

"They forgot to draw on my coffee cup," she said, coming in and throwing her bag on the table. "I mean, don't they know who I am? Marisa draws on it every morning."

She shows me cat videos and I feel the inside of my sleeves, reveling in clean cotton and lavender laundry detergent. Strange how the clock-like thuds of a washing machine could somehow validate a familial struggle, some need for parental guidance in the terror of the adult unknown - but I can do my laundry now, I can wash this blue-striped thing and call it clean - what a blessing, what a privilege; the endless joy of hamper autonomy -

I stayed up reading, similar to elementary school, less-than-similar course material, though probably comparable themes. I almost teared up once - "You always look so cool," (what Daisy told Gatsby) and probably shivered. Fitzgerald solidified the statement as an amorous declaration and I think nothing could be more on-point, really, the wavering certainty that the glowing pink suit across the room was rad enough to be repeated five years later, wineglass trembling in hand and hanging on words like trapezes. Such a pity for the guy, five reads later, when he still goes out to swim and scores a record low-attendance funeral. I love you, F. Scott Fitzgerald, I said before I went to sleep last night. What a homie. Keepin' us deterred from any existential meaning since 1925.

I couldn't stop thinking about how real it all was, so infinitely opposite from running my fingers along a five-inch screen. Cloud cover of necessity, but so much grey - covering the sky from end-to-end with everything, some archaic cricket chirps against the grey-green weeds and sidewalk cracks. It felt like embroidery, braided somehow into conversation, deft and clean. Straight stitches, Ursa Major, sisters talking. She looked like a picture and the day was all-encompassing, pressing furtively then furiously against the night. I could count things to say like freckles, but I blinked them away bc

[VISCISSITUDE  > VULNERABILITY]

"I don't wanna talk about it - "

"Okay."

"But let's just, like, think about it at the same time."

"Okay - "

a plant called Cecilia

I named a row of treatment-spurred succulents after Simon and Garfunkel songs, because why the cuss not? I felt the weight of my adulthood, walking through the rows of ceramic vegetable pots and wishing I remembered the genus and species of the specific carnation in the soil bed to the left. There was sand seeping through my salt waters and some mediocre ambiance; a bunch of songs I'd only heard vaguely while trekking behind my mama's shopping cart, enduring Saturday morning grocery outings, rewarded only by the apologetic Smarties at the cash register.

I turned 18 and felt absolutely nothing. My family sent me flowers and a three-by-three note, and I spent the day with people I'd never met, covered from head to toe in confusion and wondering where I'd misstepped on my railway of resignation. Horticulturalism meant much less than the surprising proximity of the Botany Pond when I finally moved home, which in turn was much less surprising than its being named after the university Botany department. I remember her telling me about her dreams of art therapy, her voice like hazelnuts and her skin like maple leaves, lovely and teeming with nostalgia and charcoal tones. I remember her writing about dogs meandering along Mexican roofs and wondering where, where on earth the time went --

"I swear, I was in middle school two weeks ago" --

It felt a bit ridiculous, after a while. The rooster lamp on the dresser beside mine, bought solely for the purpose of a college dorm--who even conceptualizes aviary lighting devices?!--but I put up with it because Lauren was everything to me and I would've put up with essentially anything, granted there was leeway for a few snide remarks and a lot of veggie straws, altoids on the side and enough Taylor Swift to render us emotionally static in a blissful, teenager-y kinda way. She's in England now and I'm feeling 

so 

cussing

young --

It kinda hurts, almost, how young I feel.