So Here Goes

I was sitting on a roof for hours in the pouring rain. It was late—the kind of late where you don’t really know what hour it is anymore, after the sun has faded into sunset and the sunset has faded in to stars. I was wet. Soaking, really, but I sat there for hours.

I let my legs dangle off the edge, in a way that I would have been too scared to do if the sun was brighter or I was just a little more sober. Other people sat with me. Not the whole time—in shifts of coming and going.  

It was warm. The beginning of spring, and I could have seen the trees blooming with the kind of bright flowers that seem to only exist in my Midwestern day-dreams-- if it had been light enough for me to see.

I watched the shadows of my feet, swinging back and forth. Darker then the darkness of the sidewalk.

I was happy.

There’s something really simple about the memories I have of that period of time. They feel gauzy, almost like I’m seeing them through layers of smoke and paper shades, or from the balcony seats of a theatre I know well. They feel distant, but still warm, still inviting.

I’ve never been very good at that whole “living in the moment” thing. I need time to process. To assess. To take in everything that is happening around me. I’m an observer by nature—I take in details and moments and lock them away somewhere in the back of my brain.

Which is why I love to write. I love to work out those kinks in the narrative that is my life, and seeing my story on a page always makes it so much clearer in my head. Moments like that time I spent on the roof are moments I appreciated at the time, sure, but seem so different in my recollection of them.

I get so caught up in if my words are worth sharing that sometimes I forget that I need to please myself. So, just like I did last year, I’m going to be putting up something that I have written every single day of November. It will be personal essays and recollections, stories of how I spent my day, and maybe even a poem or two.

But it will be something that I wrote. My words, on the screen. My recollections. Me, processing my life while I live it.

So here goes.