An impulse.

I haven't written in nearly a year. I started writing and then I stopped. Everyone has a blog or two. I follow odd ones, or none at all as the mood strikes me. I am fascinated or overwhelmed. We are creating all this text. Tap tap tap. And who will read it all. My heart hurts with the thought of the abandoned words, not really existing anywhere, and everywhere at the same time. The abandoned blogs. The lost hours and impulses and thoughts and tangents. All those gorgeous tangents.

And then I just sit back and remember the story of the woman that burned her journals. She burned them all and couldn't write until she knew that they would be burned.

And I am not her. I want someone to read this, oddly, but I am not exactly sure why, but for some misaligned hankerings of my ego, to be lauded and honoured for my genieus.

But maybe I will sit back and say, hey, I am the product. And resist the capitalist implications of turning everything, even me, into a commodity for value.

Or maybe I will think of another circle to go around in my head.

Back to School

I was running in nearby Grovelands Park last night, enjoying the sunny cool weather now that we are back in London from our journeys around the US. (It was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit there. I can't seem to get celsius, even though I have been living with it for years. I just made celsius sound like a disease.) I was enjoying the Fall-ness (ahem), the Autumnal quality of the air when I happened upon a football practice. Boys were wearing pinnies, but I didn't pay much attention or observe much else about the practice because I was suddenly drawn back pretty much against my will to the Falls of Michigan past.

I remember returning back from vacations with my family much like the one Tony and I just returned from: hot road trips where we stayed with a lot of family and made distances, not always space or time to relax. Great holidays, like this one. Not anything I would trade for the world, but always felt abrupt when we returned.

Before you even got a chance to unpack (I still haven't for example), you were back to school (with or without the apparently requisite supplies or new clothes) and suddenly there was that first soccer practice. You might be on a new team, mostly not, but there were changes. New kids. Same kids only bigger. You were bigger. Suddenly you were in that next grade, the one that intimidated you last year. And the air turned colder, and you remembered that however impossible it may seem, where there had been the utter, dire necessity of popsicles and air-conditioning, there would soon be the necessity of massive winter coats and layers of clothes and rubbing your hands together and sticking them under your arms and between your thighs to keep them from needing to be removed by a medical professional. Or so it seemed.

It seemed impossible. And yet here it was, the tangible evidence. Those falls introduced me to the sensation that time was going too quickly. Perhaps it is because summer was (and will always be) my favourite season. But most likely it was because that week or two right before and as school starts, time becomes distorted, like it does in so many other lovely and breath-takingly heartbreaking and aching moments of our lives. We anticipate and resist in equal measure. We are scared for change and hungry for it.

And now I work in a school and want to become a teacher. The idea that this annual sensation, as crisp and painful and cherished as it is and all the memories and associations that it attaches to is something I am inviting into my life is mind-blowing for me. Not only because it is something that scares the hell out of me, but because I know that fear is exactly why this is the right choice.