This is Finals Week.

While I study, I keep a blank Microsoft word document open.

This is where I write all my thoughts, so they can have a place. 
Because when they don’t get a place of their own, 
when I don’t listen to them… 
they won’t let me study anything else.

Sometimes these thoughts are inspired by what I’m learning. 

Sometimes they are trying to survive, 

despite the irrelevance of things I’m learning.

These days, most if not all of my writing is done this way, 

right inside of everything else.

My laptop has almost no memory left.

So while I am typing, it struggles to catch up. Thoughts don’t actually appear on the screen until minutes later. It’s ok though, I can’t keep up with them either. So I understand.

On this page are short paragraphs and three word phrases.

Some are directed at certain people— words I have to say right now.

Some are just thoughts for sending outwards, towards anything.

There is a letter to God, so personal that I couldn’t post it for you. Not even because I am embarrassed for you to see that part of me, but because it is sacred to me. It deserves to be selectively exposed. Does that make sense to anyone out there?

Here are two pieces of what started on that page today.

Do you ever hear a few sincere guitar chords and suddenly remember everyone you ever loved? I am overcome with old questions, thoughts of the lake and the radio and saying goodnight.

That happened to me today. A lot of those times are over forever. A lot of them were later exposed to be less pure that I had thought. But it just doesn’t matter. All of them remain. All of them are capable of resurfacing. A few sincere chords. And there they were. I was sitting in the library. But I miss those people.

Is this normal?

Does anyone else’s heart do this?

Sometimes I feel very foolish just spillin my love everywhere, like I have no control where it goes. People are staring but I just can’t hold it all at once.

Like you know when you have a huge load of laundry? And you’re tryin to carry it all in your arms but you just know you can’t do it? I used to try in my first apartment, try to carry my clothes from the dryer, down the hall to my door. But my socks always fell and I’d have to go back to get them. I felt like that today in the library, like I was carryin my love around the fourth floor. It just showed up in my hands after I heard the guitar comin through my headphones.  I did my best to put it away. But it was fallin everywhere like my socks, the socks always do. If people had known all I was feeling, if it had shown up like laundry in my arms, I think they would stare. “Doesn’t she know that’s personal?” they would say. “Isn’t she worried that we’ll see? What if her underwear falls out?! This is the library.”

Sometimes I feel very foolish with my arms so full, but I can’t help it and I don’t want to.

Just see my love.

I saw an album title today: Love is red. It said.

He’s right, love is red.

* * * * * 

I am reading about Shakespearian times. 

There were letters with titles so long I laugh before I finish reading them:

"To the Noble and most Vertuous Princesse, Elizabeth, by the Grace of God, of England, Fraunce, and Irelande, Queen, defender of the Faith. Etc:"

"The Copy of a Letter Largely Written in Meter, by a Young Gentlewoman to Her Unconstant Lover"

I think about what my letters might be titled:

An Email To a Very Busy T.A. Who May or May Not Hate Her Life When I Tell Her That None of my Grades Have Been Posted Online And This Ofcourse Means All is Lost... Forever.

To My Brother Elder Brown, Who I Want so Bad to be Best Friends With Even Though I was Sometimes Mean to You in High School and Who Should Really Stop Being Obsessed With His Girlfriend Who Never Writes and Just Write Me Instead.

To the One I Have So Much To Say To, Here is Another Letter That I Will Write And Never Send Because I do This Almost Every Day Just To Help Me Figure Out What I’m Feeling. But No Worries, In a Moment Of Involuntary Honesty, Probably Within The Next Few Days, I will Say it All Outloud Like I Always Do.

* * * * *