Leave

This imminence is almost unbearable. Everything is in bloom and waiting for me to move. Less than three weeks until everything will be released, and my eye has subsided to half-hearted reminders I am stressed. 

One more critique and one more research paper left in my undergraduate career. Several other things due soon, but enough in due time. I am more than ready to tackle my reading this summer, helping others and hopefully moving east for the first time in years. For now, I will work on learning to stay present. But this future has so much weighting potential—

Organized?

I have an intensive overview calendar I draw out every three weeks on white cardstock. This, along with with scraps of paper I use to write down class assignments and a notepad on my desk for regurgitating errands to complete. A printed calendar with important deadlines written in bold, black Sharpie hangs on my wall. A dry-erase calendar sits unmarked in the kitchen next to the sink, a rectangle for me to stare at while I wait for water to boil. Smaller sheets of dot-graph paper hold the impending dates for my senior seminar class; this I keep tacked to my studio wall and hardly glance at. I have a palm-sized black Moleskine for general thoughts and a suite of three Field Notes journals that organize my personal meetings, my finances and grocery list. A small John Deere flipbook denotes the immediate errands I must run on a particular day, and post-its litter my purse, my desk-drawer, my research books... Not to mention the obsessive calendaring I impose on Google Calendar. The alarm settings to remind oneself is an incredible feature.

It is all I can do to keep breathing. A studio visit with a professor revealed I must "keep my heart Chakra open," keep my posture from closing all my energy inside. And so I took the last two rolls of white butcher paper I had and cut sections out that were as large as me. I wrestled with them, using my entire body to fold and tuck and strangle and kick and tear. And then I tacked them onto a wall and decided it was An Exodus.

Just

And another week in this final semester waits to be filled. I've begun Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. When the cold death house was being torn apart and abandoned, I took my father's books and adopted them as my own. This book especially sat above his desk, nestled in with outdated books on C++ and Java.

It is this severe reminiscing that is causing me weight. I can't help but gather my memories and count them, like Baby Suggs and her colors. I am desperate for spring imminent, like everybody else. Like everybody else, I am wanting a "next step" to be visible.

This right-between-heaven-and-hell breeds sickness. I've self-diagnosed to clean up my computer's filing system and drink copious amounts of Earl Grey.