Tonight, finals concluded.

I just survived the most excruciating 5 months of my life.  I surpassed even my own expectations. Like holy fucking shit that was INTENSE.

Then I treated myself to a Happy Meal, sat on my friend’s floor, and realized IT’S ALL OKAY.

m

m

when my sister and i were little, my mom would wake us up in the morning before school and drag us sleepy-eyed to her bed. then we’d mumble what we wanted to breakfast, usually fruit loops with café con leche or toast with cinnamon and butter, and my mom would tuck us back in and head to the kitchen. a little later, we’d hear her coming down the hall, the rattling of the orange juice glass, the silver wear clanking. then she’d sit us up and serve us breakfast in bed on trays. this all sounds incredibly spoiled seeing as though she did it for years, but it was done out of love. our mom loved to be there for us, to cook individual breakfasts, to see her little girls in her big bed watching little house on the prairie before school.  this is the type of mom we have, the one girls dream of.  my sister and i will be this type of mommy one day because we learned from the best.

feliz día de la madre

m

People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles. This is the first thing I hear when I come back to the city. Blair picks me up from LAX and mutters this under her breath as she drives up the onramp. She says, “People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles.” Though that sentence shouldn’t bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter. Not the fact that I’m eighteen and it’s December and the ride on the plane had been rough and the couple from Santa Barbara, who were sitting across from me in first class, had gotten pretty drunk. Not the mud that had splattered on the legs of my jeans, which felt kind of cold and loose, earlier that day at an airport in New Hampshire. Not the stain on the arm of the wrinkled, damp shirt I wear, a shirt which looked fresh and clean this morning. Not the tear on the neck of my gray argyle vest, which seems vaguely more eastern than before, especially next to Blair’s clean tight jeans and her pale-blue shirt. All of this seems irrelevant next to that one sentence. It seems easier to hear that people are afraid to merge than “I’m pretty sure Muriel is anorexic” or the singer on the radio crying out about magnetic waves. Nothing else seems to matter to me but those ten words. Not the warm winds, which seem to propel the car down the empty asphalt freeway, or the faded smell of marijuana which still faintly permeates Blaire’s car. All it comes down to is the fact that I’m a boy coming home for a month and meeting someone whom I haven’t seen for four months and people are afraid to merge.

m