When It’s Almost Been a Year: how to keep a place beautiful.

Dear Arizona,

It’s been raining this weekend for what feels like the first time in weeks and I’m constantly so surprised how comforting the sound is, even now, months after walking up and falling asleep to it.

I’m almost done with my freshman year in college. Whenever that thought runs through my head I quickly push it away because I’m not sure if I’m ready to think about and deal with that yet.A year ago at this time I was stressing out about finals, my graduation speech and song, and social interactions. But now I can’t remember if I graduated on the 27th of May or the 29th. (I feel like it was the 29th but my memory holds the 27th as something special.)

I’ve been here for a year, almost. I mean, maybe not a four-seasonal year, but a school year. I’ve been calling this small room my home since September. Sometimes I hear myself saying, “I’m going to go home first and I’ll meet you after,” and it sounds both strange and just right. I haven’t given up my home on Fillmore St in Arizona, yet. But, I’ve changed my definition for home. I’ve split it into two different things, where one is the place that I sleep tonight and one is the place that I dream of. (I still wake up confused, sometimes, wondering where the light is coming from; I think the noise my suit-mates make as they get ready for the morning is coming from the living room as my dad plays with the dogs. I can close my eyes and walk around any room in the house I grew up.)
I’ve been here for a year, almost, and it still occasionally gives me the same feeling I got when I visited for the first time, in April 2011. There are times that I find myself taking advantage of this place and it’s beauty. I’ll spend all day inside or sleep during a sunny afternoon. But, I try to catch myself when I do that, I once I do I can see it all over again; misted rain and walls of green trees that wrap me up and and breathe me in.

On Saturday Sydney, Cora, and I spent an afternoon together. With the end of the year and the stresses and commitments we all have it’s been a little harder to all have free time together, or at least- for me it has been. But we told secrets on Cora’s bed, our heads near the window and our legs fighting for room because the dorm beds are too small for six adult legs. Afterwards we went into the forest in search of a tree I’ve come to believe can only exist in the presence of a certain imagination. Sydney took us to her secret nature-journaling spot, next to a little stream with buzzing mosquitoes. To get there we had to climb over fallen logs and through ferns that grew around-and-despite the toppled trees and I told myself as I walked across one of the logs (Sydney went first as our guide and as she stepped onto it she said, “This one’s the tricky one”) that this was a reason. This was a moment to write about and to remember in a year. Because if I can remember that moment then I can remind myself and have more. I can keep myself from getting too stuck and complacent in this place, which is anything but. If I can remember the three of us sitting next to that stream and batting the bugs off of our bare legs as we drew on Artist’s Conks (mushroom, super cool, check it out if you dare) then I can return, again. Even if I never remember the mudded pathways to the shelters made from sticks and crook trees, with trivial treasures piled into an alter and mobiles made of pottery-leaves I will remember going off the trail to find them. I will remember the three of us laughing as our legs got scratched and our shoes sunk in mud; as we ran along a narrow trail while howling and yipping, feeling free as the wind we ran with.

That night, after we got back to campus to play some music and hung out for Evergreen’s 40th Anniversary, a few of us went to this “Wilderness Party” (which was totally ridiculous but awesome in its own very weird way) and I took a moment at one point to look up – it was a New Moon so the sky was clear and dark- and think, hey, thank you for this being my livf, Universe.

And now, with the cloudy grey light coming through my window, I’ll say it again. Hey, thank you for this really great life, Universe.
Love you, AZ.
xoxox e.