Morning Daze
The air meets you at the door, a cool embrace tightens the skin around your bones, sprouting subtle bumps to prove it. However, your walk to class soon makes you numb to these sensations. Securing your headphones in place, you let your feet hit the ground in a rhythmic pattern assuring you’re in synch with the world around you. An expectation within a college landscape.
The sun tries to persuade you of its beauty on your way to class; the way it enlivens the soft blue sky without the extra clouds to ruin its love. But you know the sky is blue. Why stop to catch a detail that persists to be true over hours and days? It’s the subtleties you’re willing to overlook, as your gaze remains fixated down on the dense, black concrete that tracks your progress from point A to point B. You’ll notice these joys when they’re gone, fading into the hues of winter.
By Midday
Before your next class, you rush to the nearest line for coffee. Any place will do. Ubiquitous chatter plays as a dull soundtrack, while you let your thumb methodically sweep the glass screen in your hand. A series of images and brief descriptions occupy the small box. You briefly ruminate on each with a steady, fixed gaze, yet the task only serves as a mindless pleasure, a way to occupy awkward space. Every conscious moment must be saturated with content.
With a cup of black coffee for a companion, you make your way again, as idleness doesn’t feel appropriate. The rich and potent taste in your cup soon becomes lost by the frantic sips you take. Caffeine has developed into a beloved ally in the fight against nights deficient in sleep and days stuffed with movement.
Rush Hour’s Reign
You walk out of class, letting the door close with finality, yet the day still asks more of you. In the hall, you meet your friends for dinner, though you walk alone. The phones that sit restlessly in their pockets have been dormant for fifty minutes too long. Every app deserves to be refreshed and looked after.
As you gather your food in the dining hall and find a seat among the maze of tables, you sit, still for just a moment. In making conversation, your friends’ words are hollow; their resonance can’t compete with the list of ‘to-dos’ nagging the back of your mind, conceived by your internal wariness of late and incomplete work. There’s urgency fluttering around in your stomach, and it will not calm until every task has been accounted for. Although there’s always more you could do.
Midnight Meditation
Finally, you reach the end. For today. Sleep doesn’t find you the way it used to. In bed, you stare above at the white ceiling. The darkness wrestles with your eyes, as you try to make out the detailing above. You had never given notice to its texture. Who gifts their time to the ceiling?
Yet with every breath, deepening with a strength from your stomach, you immerse yourself in the marked and spotted elements on that soften the space. You find an ease that settles over you, supplied by the nuance spotted from your eyes.
Perspective is always there when you look.