"And then a thought came into my brain that wasn’t like the other thoughts. It was closer to me, and louder. I didn’t know where it came from, or what it meant, or if I loved it or hated it. It opened up like a fist, or a flower." -- Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Today, something inside of me bloomed. Perhaps that is ironic, considering the world that is dying beautifully before my eyes; nonetheless, as the leaves turn red and gold and brown and tango with gravity to the earth, something within my chest is exploding in bloom, an entirely different kind of beautiful.
I am not sure what these blossoms look like, but I know they are lovely, because how could they not be? Anything growing, bursting into existence from nothing, speckling a barren landscape with miraculous punctuation, is bound to be beautiful.
Where did these blossoms come from? Did something plant the seeds inside of me? -- were they planted, lying dormant inside me, all along? Perhaps this is only the rebirth of something that had lost its petals long ago.
In a sense, I think that must be accurate, because I think part of what is blooming is my desire to create, to record my thoughts, to write in this blog once more. My last post marked the beginning of a very busy and complicated time of my life -- the most important two months of the swim season hand me at a championship meet nearly every weekend; following that, I had a lot of end-of-the year work to do, not to mention making one of the biggest decisions of my life thus far, choosing where I was going to go to college.
To be completely honest, though, I think the biggest reason I stopped blogging is because I lost momentum. I got busy, I got stressed, I had more important things to do and think about. And because it's so easy to not do things, I never really started back up once all of those things had passed.
Part of me is disappointed in myself, because I think a lot of transformative things happened in the months I was not blogging that I would have liked to document as they were happening. Obviously, for many of them, I can do my best to write in retrospect, but that is a different type of writing in itself. Part of what is lovely about blogging is that it preserves who you are, what you are feeling at the exact moment in time you are writing, and I would have liked to preserve that transformation truly and candidly.
I guess, though, there is not much I can do about those lost opportunities to write in the moment at the end of my senior year and throughout the summer. All I can do is try to remember, record how I feel about them now, start preserving myself once more.
Part of me is disappointed in myself, because I think a lot of transformative things happened in the months I was not blogging that I would have liked to document as they were happening. Obviously, for many of them, I can do my best to write in retrospect, but that is a different type of writing in itself. Part of what is lovely about blogging is that it preserves who you are, what you are feeling at the exact moment in time you are writing, and I would have liked to preserve that transformation truly and candidly.
I guess, though, there is not much I can do about those lost opportunities to write in the moment at the end of my senior year and throughout the summer. All I can do is try to remember, record how I feel about them now, start preserving myself once more.
In any case, it is nice to be back. I may not know what the blossoms of my desire to return look like, or when they were planted -- all I know is that in the end, they have come from me. And, for now, that is the most important thing I can realize.
