sunflower

06/13/2023

I'm sitting on my stripped mattress in the middle of the last night. Everything is back the way it started, nearly, after weeks and days and hours of packing and shifting and deconstructing it. None of it was that bothersome, until today, with furniture back exactly how it was, walls bare, desks bare. Tomorrow it will all be gone, every last hairtie and blanket and book, and it will all be exactly the way it was, save for a little bit dirtier and the sunflower i drew on the bottom of my bed with permanent marker. Exactly as it was before April and I walked in and exchanged friendly greetings, before a year that was a patchwork of lessons learned and bad habits formed, tears and new overalls and midnight kitchens. Wednesday it will be as if we were never there at all. Next fall, a blank slate for someone else. I guess the door looks the same before you open it to go in and when you lock it on the way out.

I guess I'm thinking about how it all comes back around. Living out of a suitcase, lost in the temporary. The blank, empty room. Hours on the phone, smiling at someone hundreds of miles away. People who come and go, who are friendly but feel like strangers. It's all the same, but so completely different. There's history here for me now, it's not my favorite and it's not my best and it wont ever matter to anyone else, but it's history to me. At the beginning, it felt so long and predetermined and now I can't imagine next week. Each day seemed slower this month, but soon I will stop counting hours and go back to running and climbing and gallivanting along with hands sticky with jam, feeling the world spin beneath me and not getting lost in the numbers. I can't fathom that I am so different, and yet I feel exactly the same.

Tomorrow, I'll finish the last of the packing. Letter writing and cleaning a stain off the walls, package pickup and key return. Studying. Hah. Tomorrow I'll go on the roof for a bit if I have time. Tomorrow I will leave and so will April, our history here erased like the whiteboards of lists and sketches I still have to put away. Maybe someone will find the sunflower. Someone lived here before. But of course someone lived here before, and I don't think about them either, so why will they?