unitivemossagain

[unitivemossagain]

I have some really awesome and great things going on in my life recently. Asked God yesterday if I should more heavily consider the fact that I may be into women and then literally almost shit my pants. Ok what does that mean

[unitivemossagain]

Virga Draft 1

Last weekend I went back to my old college town. There was a concert going on, two artists I vaguely knew and halfway listened to, but I was excited nonetheless. I graduated a year early and my roommate's boyfriend was a senior, so it wasn't like I didn't go up there often.

It always feels weird, going up there again. I still know things, can drive around without a map. The dining hall workers still know my name. But things are different, too. The intersection down the hill has new pavement and planters. One upperclassmen dorm has been replaced with a grassy, fenced-off field. My best friend lives in my old bedroom.

But I have a good time. My best friend is my best friend, after all, and it is always so refreshing to see her. I have lots of friends who I miss dearly who still go there, and it is equally wonderful to see them too. I always feel so nostalgic, bittersweet going up there.

I miss it but I don't. I live in a city now, if you could even call it that. Pittsburgh, the steel city, the fastest growing tech center in the nation. Not that it really mattered to me, I was an aspiring biologist, but the concrete jungle lacked a certain charm that my college town had in spades. Everything I complained about while living there, the hills, the classes and people, the unfairness of it all, it wasn't so bad in hindsight. I missed it.

So going back, it always brings up this mess of emotions. I'm anxious and nervous one second, feeling like a cock in the henhouse the next. I am unstoppable, limitless, and one mistake away from completely failure. I have no idea what I am doing with my life.

So on Sunday afternoon at about 3:00pm, I was feeling rather dismal. The prospect of going home was exhausting, especially given that the pot at the end of the rainbow looked like a brick-and-linoleum-floor-bedroom-with-no-windows-and-no-friends-and-probably-some-bugs. And I was coming down from being stupidly high, which infected me with a sinister energy. To make matters worse, the route home was littered with severe thunderstorm warnings, and I was driving alone.

Coaxing bell boy duties and setting my destination to "Loneliest Up and Coming Tech City on the Map," I began to make my trip home in silence. It is rather peculiar for me to not listen to music, but the thought of the sound filling the car and settling in my ear drums was too much in my melancholic state. I thought of calling someone to help the time pass, but the idea of speaking at all felt similar.

So I drove in complete silence, eyes locked on the road and fighting through that post-high haze. I could feel the storms building in the air, and kept a close eye on the dark skies around me. The clouds were towering, looming, and every moment it didn't start raining felt like the one right before it did.

I thought about a lot of things while I was driving, but I mostly thought about that storm. I kept waiting and waiting for the rain to fall, for the downpour to start pouring down, but the closest I got was a brief shower about halfway through. The world seemed to hold its breath as my 2014 Chevy Sonic sped down 79.

It was like driving on a tightrope. To my left were these massive, hulking monsters in the sky, bent arms and legs of clouds clawing their way from the eye to reach the cloud shore. They were rough and tumbled, everything knotting together and pulling on itself, winding tighter and tighter and tighter. The air felt like it could be cut it you could catch it, charged and anticipating. I felt it over me in an ancient sense, the way I imagine the men on the frontlines of the armies of old felt as their enemies charged towards them.

To my right though, the sky was brilliant. It was hazy, the air holding its water in a thin sheet that covered the earth. The setting sun shone brilliantly through it, its frosty rays feeling as though they beckoned you towards them. They stretched out to the storm behind me, pulled it in and invited it closer. In some more fun, dramatic universe I imagined myself veering off the road and straight into the light, off to find whatever they where the storm was heading.

It was so strange, that drive. Being on either side of the storm, being right in the center of two true, opposing things, I felt myself split clean down the middle. I could feel which side of me was on the storm side, which side roiled and wrapped itself inside out. I could feel which side shone and reached out into nothing, could feel that hopefulness and wonder and a desire to hold on to something that was only holding on to itself.

I thought again about the old days, about days before cars and steel and cities and the weather channel. I thought about two people, my sister and I, feeling the heaviness in the air and the static in our mouths when we laughed and knowing there's a storm coming. I thought about sitting out, feeling it get closer, knowing something bigger than yourself. I thought about siting outside until just after you feel that first drop, and I thought of the mad dash we would make home, trying only a little to outrun the rain.

I don't know what it was about that drive. Maybe there was something in the air, maybe it was some sort of after high, or maybe I am a girl in her 20s searching for meaning anywhere. But I felt so lucky in that moment, like me and everyone on highway 79 were being shone something important. I spent that entire drive thinking about what it would be like to live in those clouds, both sides, to live in towering spires of storm gray clouds that thundered around you. To lounge around on ash white dew drops that held perfectly in a ray of sunshine, fade through the air like pollen on the breeze.

It mostly made me feel important. Something about being in your 20s is so jarring. Once you graduate college, your life is just like being woken up and told you're late for school, everyone is there and knows that you aren't. Everything is a game of catch-up, everyone knows more than you, and even when they don't they will make you think they do. But driving down the edge of that storm, seeing something so entirely separate from myself and yet so tied up in everything I am, I felt like I did have a place, and it was right there in the middle.