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 - "