I’m reading a book right now that is making me miss college. It’s actually making me miss a version of college I never had. I never lived on campus never taught abroad never did any traveling of any sort. The whole time I worked two jobs and had two majors. I ran here and there all day every day on a solo mission to stay afloat and always have a place of my own to go. So rereading Elif Batuman’s The Idiot is crazy because that is the college culture she grew up in and with. It’s something very Eastern European. High academic expectations, lots of travel and well-planned activities. The narrator is aware of her luck, and so am I.

I’m also more generally missing the weather from a couple weeks ago. Like that one day that it was randomly foggy. I remember that I was missing it while I was still in it. I drove up a mountain and parked by a lake and got out to walk around in the fogginess. I knew it wouldn’t last. I tried to savior it. The serenity was so pure wandering inside a cloud out in the wild. But it got dark fast out of nowhere, and I had forgotten how far I’d even walked. I stepped forward faster and faster, almost in a daze. I was very suddenly scared of being alone. That wasn’t even what I came there for. I just needed to get outside in general. Nowadays it’s usually too cold to be outside for no real reason.

Stuff like that makes me feels like I’m always in transition. It’s kinda exhausting. Christmas ends and the next morning I was there putting the tree away sweeping up everything putting the table back where it was. I was officially done with it. I want to clean up and organize all my son’s new toys and have everything back to how it was. My apartment looks like exactly how it did when I moved in. Every day. I can’t leave it upside down. It’s something I simply have to do and even tho while I’m doing it, I’m sick of it. I want to move away for a year and do something else somewhere else. Maybe teach English abroad then come back and start a literacy program. But can’t do that right now because of corona.

-Rachel Wagner 2020

Other pieces I wrote on this topic: Reading bill bissett & Self soothing is 4 suckers & Cardio is mad addictive & Another day 11/9