south by southwest

sometimes those graduate school things and work things and study things wear you out so you jump in your car and you drive.

Along the way you think and sing and laugh and talk to your friend for three hours on speaker phone and then you get to the place where the peaches grow and it's like coming home because there are people here that know you.

***

I work with women who have cancer.

I watch these women spend their lives going to doctors appointments for months on end. I watch them lose their hair. Surgery, radiation and chemo take their strength like thieves in the night. Then I watch them pull their lives back together. Wearing wigs, doing yoga, working in between treatments, meeting with each other, breathing in and out.

***

The busier I get, the more tied down I get, the more I need to be here in the present and focused, the more my feet want to move, the more I want to leave all this stuff (this "stuff" being my current life and responsibilities) behind. Is it all worth it? Somehow backpacking in the Grand Canyon or eating Belgian Waffles in Belgium seem like much better uses of my time. I have so far to go before I'm an actual grown up, but I'm not sure I'm a fan of this grown up stuff. The choices I make have much larger consequences. I am becoming the person I'll be for the rest of my life. It's pretty heavy stuff, you know?

So in order to counteract such serious business I hide a large cardboard cutout of this season's The Bachelor in my roommate's closet. I have pizza parties with my roommates that result in our house full of smoke and all of us laughing (and coughing) so hard we can't breathe. I dance it out in my room to "Tainted Love" or pound my feet on the pavement to "I Love You Like a Love Song." I read late into the night when I should go to bed and eat brownies for breakfast as I rush out the door with wet hair. I hope these things never change.