My days have been busy lately but I find contentment in the steady rhythm of my life in the hazy days of September. Sometimes monotony can be mindless but I've found comfort in it in this season of my life I'm in. There is a part of me savoring the last bits of university life before I'm thrust into what most people call "the real world" (but isn't it all real?), of course, these are broken up by moments of reckless eagerness to be in the next stage of my life. But for now I enjoy these things:
Waking up in my bed amassed in a tangle of white sheets, admittingly that are coffee stained where I've carelessly sipped one too many steaming cups in bed (my grandmother told me not to get white; she was right as always). A drip here, a drip there...they make me smile at my inescapable character fall of clumsiness.
I love how even on the most rushed mornings, which let's point out that's most, I adore the calmness of morning. It's newness of possibility astounds me and leaves me with a heart heavy hopeful. Sweet morning air wafting in from my open window as I can hear the birds rejoicing with me in a new day. I stretch my arms high above my shoulders as my nightgown rises up in compliance. Crossed legs and a cup of steaming coffee at my desk to do my makeup, with the melodious familiarity of Ed Sheeran playing softly through my iphone to be my first companion to the day.
I'm usually stumbling out the door with my headphones half in one ear and dropping my keys on the ground with a clamoring thud to wake up all of my hung over neighbors to their dismay early in the morning. My walk to classes each morning is one I look forward to; to just be in my mind as I traverse across a campus of picturesque sidewalk trails and towering trees. Looping in and out and all around oblivious students also immersed in their own world. I always study them without them knowing because they fascinate me. I wonder about them. How if I asked them a series of questions about their life how similar or dissimilar it would be to mine. How tragic or how woefully complacent. I want to invite them out for a cup of coffee.
My classes interest me this semester. They're filled with things that are important. Which wills me on to learn more and actually fill myself up with knowledge and seek it instead of rejecting it. Things like journalism and ethics and the globe and the environment and people and emotions and impact. It all feels real and potent to my life. But I do daydream, of course. I love to let my mind roam to people I can't tell you about because I want to keep them in my mind to replay over and over again selfishly. Keeping them in my mind sometimes make it feel as if they're not real; but I know they are. I know they happened and I know I won't ever forget.
Work never really feels like work and I think that's perhaps one of the first times in my life that that's happened with the slew of jobs I've had since I learned to drive my red 2006 VW beetle at 16 years old in high school. I love to make coffee. I love to interact with people. Don't you think it's strange that a person who hates people loves them? I hate people because I am an introvert and I cannot fight my innate nature to be alone. But there is this part of me, that loves to love people. I find them so fascinating, so riveting I can't stop wanting to know more and open them up page by page as if I was reading the most enthralling novel ever. I think what coffee drink a person orders says a lot about them. It's been an honor to be able to have regulars and make drinks with love and give a kind smile that causes a face to illuminate. I was able to make a heart in a cappuccino today with the foam. I considered it one of my greatest accomplishments yet.
By evening when I get off I am usually smelling strongly of espresso and my cheap $1 eyeliner from wal-mart has made its way to settle underneath my lower lashline. I'm always content though and just like the walk away from my apartment in the morning, the walk back to it is a pleasure. I think and I reflect and sometimes I smile to myself because it's been a good day. It really has. And I know tomorrow will hold the same. Unlocking my stubborn apartment door and hearing the satisfying thud of my backpack hit the floor and the weight relieved off my tired shoulders is the start of my evenings. The favorite time of my days.
It's my time, and perhaps that's why I love evenings so much. I am so selfish but I love to be alone. I bask in every minute of my aloneness as I'm able to finally unwind and let go and just be. Usually I take drawn out baths in my janky tub that doesn't have a stopper and read some classic novel I'm trying to get a grasp on (but I'm usually not intelligent enough or deep enough to understand what the hell the point is). It's worth a good try. I love to lean back into the steaming water and let the short wisps of my hair float around my face, curling inward and outward as I stare up at the popcorn ceiling this fine establishment of an apartment complex decided to implement. Evening tea time is my favorite time. I carefully select a mug from my vast array of thrifted oddities. One that says "love me, I'm irish" although I have not a hint of irish blood in me, or the one with a 1960's John F. Kennedy beaming at me with his handsome, devilish face. It's always a Bigelow mint tea bag that I place in my mug after heating up the water for just two minutes. I like to let the tea bag sit in there, although everyone tells me you aren't supposed to do that. I don't know why I do it. But I do it anyways. And I just love to sip it carefully as to not scald myself and it makes even the most boring textbook I must read for class interesting, or it inspires musings into my journal with the clarity I can usually never seem to find.
I turn all the lights out in my apartment as it falls silent. It's not quite cold enough for the heat to be turned on (but it's getting there), and so I leave my window open every night. The breeze I feel in the morning is always matched beautifully at night. I enjoy laying there at the end of the day in the dark and thinking things over and relaxing knowing that tomorrow these complacencies I have developed in my life for now will come again. And I enjoy every moment of them, because there will come a time when new complacencies will take their place.
With much love, Lauren.