Listening to an Adele song. It's funny, I'm here surrounded by data, by tasks, by lists and lists, and all I want to do is sit in the sun and read. I used to read a ridiculous amount, checking books out in the morning in middle school, reading through all of my classes. I always had a book under the desk when slides went up or when the in class problem was finished. Then I would pick out another one, the decision was always easy, and I was always at home there in the library, in this world of other worlds, I was home.
I learned so much from these characters, these people made of words and sentences, of punctuation marks and chapter breaks. My morality comes from these characters, those wonderfully flawed characters that I sat and spoke with, that followed me for weeks afterwards, those who with their individual smiles would tell me stories when classes were dull. They made me feel so much, and I fell in love with different characters, I stumbled over different stories, beautiful scenes, and I started to see life through different lenses, constantly, inexplicably falling through words, through worlds.
Now I just read poetry, and I think in poetry and I write in poetry because prose just all of a sudden seems too elaborate. Sentence structure seems so unwieldy, just another impediment to what the author is trying so hard to say. But then I read the first line of a book, the first paragraph of a story, and I can't imagine this book in a poem. And I think about the details, about the lines flowing across a page, about these characters whose faces emerge and you can't help but to say hello, how are you? A sincere hello on your part, a sincere reply on theirs and you're away.
The reason that I bring this up now is because I think I'm missing something. Just a little part of myself, just a little part of something. And maybe this missing feeling is like the curiosity that has followed me through all these years. Just another trademark that I'm going to bear, but one that's going to help drive me, help moderate me, bridge gaps to new places, to new experiences. I've gained so much in this race against time; I've learned discipline in spades, learned a lot of heat and mass and thermodynamics. I've learned about basic physics and how cells work, how cancer cells work, and I love all that I know, and have done, and learned and I wouldn't trade it for more days in the sun. But I do at times still want those days in the sun. I still want to get to know those characters, to have them be a part of me. I want to see the world a little differently, to exchange my focused lenses for someone else's. The difficult part is that we lose time when we lose focus. I lose time when I'm looking at the world through the lens of someone who sees things differently, who cares about things in different extents. I've never been good about staying detached to these characters, but then again, perhaps these last few years have taught me, have given me the discipline to stay detached.
To tell you the truth, I don't know if I want that feeling of moderation. But like birthmarks and trademarks, the imperceptible ones that we can't see, they're still there. Scars or trophies, reminders of the experiences we've been through, the lessons won, the lessons that we need to hold onto.
