I poured iced coffee into a jar yesterday afternoon and thought about Virginia.

It was 40 degrees and sunny outside, and my apartment was clean and I had fresh tulips sitting on the table, still waiting to fully bloom. I love living in Minneapolis, I really do. There's something about the city and the people and the food that makes me feel extremely understood.

But I don't have anyone to run with here, no one to drop by for tea on a random afternoon. These past six and a half months with Rob have truly felt like a blessing--like a chance to make up for the time we might have lost over the year that we were so far from one another--but there are days where I think we both would love to just have one or two of our best friends around for drinks or a laid-back weekend brunch.

I know that at some point, I will have to stop fantasizing about the time I spent as a student, because there is never going to be another time where all of my friends can drop what they're doing to just hang out. Shawna and I won't always just have an hour or two in the middle of the afternoon to meet for coffee, or decide to drink a pitcher of mimosas on a porch, or go on a quick run down our favorite trail in Charlottesville. There isn't a realistic new version of the story where Tina and her sister and I go to lunch and then spend the rest of the afternoon all cuddled up together in my bed, watching some episode of Grey's Anatomy.

But these are my favorite memories--the ones where I meet my mom for lunch every day and hang out with my dad on the lake every weekend; where almost all of the people I love are just an arm's reach away. I carry them with me everywhere I go, to every place I'll ever call home. And maybe one day, I can return to that world for good and put them down on a mantle somewhere, where they will be safe and I can start to make new ones.

Minneapolis might understand me, but Virginia knows me.


This post is in response to the following prompt: "What's been on your mind? What have you carried and gnawed over?" (From Old Friend from Far Away, page 154.) If you've written a response of your own, please share it below in the comments! 

It was this year that I finally stopped measuring my life by semester.

Do grown people still do that? For so long, my year began in the fall, took a break around Christmas, and began again in January before ending in the spring. It was Freshman Year and The Summer Of, over and over again, I guess until recently, when I started running out of things to call them. I finished graduate school in October of 2012, and then it was 2013.

Recently, I've been thinking about the years that passed by not so long ago, the ones I always refer to by name--those years that made me into who I am today. I look back and am often slightly embarrassed by the girl who was there at the time, living out the scenarios that are now my memories. Those last years of high school seemed so crucial, and yet today I look back and say "how stupid," even though I needed them.

Junior Year of High School is when I started dating the boy who, five or six whole months later would be the first guy to break my heart. He taught me how to get over something and be stronger for it at the end of the day. I was really into my running and my school and my friends and my religion and I never anticipated a day when things would be different. I applied to colleges and went on visits and tried to picture a day where things might change, but I just couldn't see it yet.

Senior Year of High School was dramatic and life-changing in the way that high school is. New boyfriend, new heartbreak, except that this one taught me how not to get over something, and all the ways you could be regretful at the end of the day. I graduated and went to college, convinced that I would never change, that I would keep all the friends I had left back home, that this must be what growing up felt like.

Freshman and Sophomore Years of College were full of new people and self-discovery; a psychology major and a Spanish major and a whole lot of intro classes before I finally declared an English major. I learned that just because someone is handsome and nice doesn't mean he is sent to you from heaven above or something, and that notion was challenged at the beginning of Junior Year when the boy I believed to be my soul mate sat down on my bed and broke up with me. He was everything I thought I ever wanted, and for a year I had ignored how hard I needed to try to be everything he thought he ever wanted. Real love is work sometimes, but it isn't hard, and I hadn't learned that yet. He taught me to love myself and be happier for it at the end of the day.

The rest of Junior Year and the following Senior Year was what I suspect college is really supposed to be--I spent time making awesome memories with my friends. I was deeply engrossed in my courses, and read hundreds of pages a day in between classes. I started feeling like William Shakespeare and I knew each other well. I stayed out too late, often drank too much, and wore ridiculous outfits to theme parties with my roommates. We got in stupid fights and never really learned how to communicate until much later, but they were my best friends and we loved each other. We ate chips and queso dip almost every afternoon in our living room. I got a tattoo, wrote every day, could barely picture a life where I wasn't a student, and met the man that, five and a half years later, I'm about to marry.

My life has been so blessed. As I grow older I am learning to be so thankful for everyone whose path has crossed mine; for everything that has gotten me to where I am today. When I was in Virginia for Thanksgiving, my old roommates and I got together for a weekend and we picked up right where we left off and had a great time, but we still all seemed so much different--the better, adult versions of ourselves. Life happens and you lose track of time. Earlier this week, Rob and I were driving to dinner together, bundled up in our coats and scarves and I almost laughed looking out the snowy window thinking about winter in Minnesota--this random possibility that has become a reality for us. We live here now--we're done with school and we're working and this is our home now. I love it. I wouldn't change a thing.

Maybe as we grow older, we encounter fewer defining moments and feel less inclined to identify years in a special way. But maybe that's not true, either, because in 2013 I got engaged to the love of my life and moved to a new part of the country. I started blogging full time and challenged myself to write more and cook more and let go of the things that scare me. I'll never forget this year--it has been one of the best. Losing my dog has made it bittersweet, missing him so much and knowing that none of us will live forever, but hoping that we'll all be reunited in some way in the future.

And with 2014 looking at us from the last page of our calendars, I know that this new year will also be life-changing as I walk down the aisle and get a new last name and will probably move again (this time with my husband) and try to find more ways to push myself and get better and feel even more thankful for this life we're living.

All of these years are special, no matter how we refer to them when we look back.

It smells like winter to me, that lotion, so once I put it on I crossed my arms over my face and breathed in deeply, remembering the really tall but wobbly air mattress we used to sleep on and the kitchen with barely anything in it that he shared with two other guys. Chilly afternoons with friends and dinners out in DC, loud bars at Halloween and high heels at holiday parties, sad Sunday afternoons filled with naps and extra kisses and four hour drives into the night.

They were days full of friends and full of fun, but they were days that sometimes felt as though they'd never end; like we'd always be separated by our jobs and the cities we lived in.

But now we have this place together, and though it sometimes also feels transitional, there are flowers in vases and all of my books are on a shelf and we share a car and say things like, "What do you want to do for dinner?" because after a day of work, we are together. And I wake up on Sunday mornings with nowhere to go and I put water on the stove for coffee and think, this is our life. And it is so good.

Sometimes I forget that we've shared three apartments.

The first one was in Roanoke, where I found anxiety and started graduate school. I felt like such an adult, grinding my coffee beans fresh every morning and parking in my garage. Rob lived there over the summer, and then Christmas break, and then moved in for another summer after his graduation from Hampden-Sydney, but it felt less like our apartment than it felt like it was mine, even if it didn't fit.

The second one was in Charlottesville, with weird green carpet and a tiny kitchen, but a little office/guest room that made us feel like we had a home. We spent hours in libraries and computer labs, at bars with cheap drinks and cornhole set up under a string of outdoor lights, and were constantly with friends. I felt like less of an adult, with a part-time job as a barista and afternoons full of research, and I loved it.

Now we're in Minneapolis, in the high-rise apartment with a balcony and a pool we never use. It's big enough and everything is new and we finally have that bookcase from IKEA that I've always wanted. This is the apartment we have as an engaged couple, and it's the first place we'll live as newlyweds. What other defining moments (other than that impending Minnesota winter) will occur while we live under this roof, I don't know yet. But I'll look back one day and see it from the future, and I'll tell you what this place was like and what it means to us because of that.

After a year apart, I forgot that living together is something Rob and I have done before--the norm, really. We've left little parts of ourselves places and picked up and taken things with us, and now we're here, together (again).

It's that time of year when I wake up with a shiver, giddy over the chill in the air and that smell of autumn that may or may not exist outside of my own imagination. I put on a scarf or a sweater, make coffee, and proceed to ignore the afternoon as it warms up, because it's still summer, but I'm ready for it to be fall.

I was running this morning and it was a damp and comfortable 60 degrees, but the sun was shining on parts of the sidewalk and I thought about how amazing it is that I could be running in Virginia (in Farmville or Roanoke or Charlottesville), or I could be running in Minneapolis, and although I am not the same person I was seven years ago, I can feel almost exactly the same at this moment that I did at that moment.

I made a turn on a new loop and was surprised by the smell of coffee coming from a shop on the corner. The coffee shop is right by our apartment building, but looking at it from a different angle; coming at it from a different street, startled me. It looked different, and I felt disoriented. I'm still getting to know my new neighborhood.

It reminded me of the time my old roommate Caroline, our friend Maggie, and I sat on the steps of a building on Longwood's campus before classes started our freshman year. I remember the cold roughness of the cement steps and the sort of horizontal platforms that jutted out on either side, and how later, one afternoon, I walked past that building on my way to something like I always did and realized that it was the same place we had sat that late summers night, weeks before.

I have moved almost every year since starting college in 2006, and each time, it has been at the end of a summer. August awakens a nostalgia in me, and I want to start over in some way every time autumn nears.

The promise of unfamiliar corners becoming ordinary fixtures is something I like. Settling in feels good.

I took the long way to an appointment on Sunday and stopped by Hollins University, the campus where I got my master's degree in Children's Literature. It had just stopped raining, and I had just met my dear friend Shawna for lunch in Daleville. The sight of the library and the post-rain mist on the mountain behind it brought back memories of the summer I spent there, dirty chai lattes in hand and copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit tucked under my arm.

Three years ago at this time, my roommate, Caroline, and I sat at a bar drinking dirty Shirleys after our last exams of college. She would go on to nursing school after graduation, and I would apply to and quickly begin a graduate program, but at that moment, sitting on those bar stools with cheap cocktails before us, the life that we had gotten so used to, and so good at, was ending.

There was a week and a day between the last exam and graduation--a time called Senior Week--where everyone who was graduating stuck around and did some considerable drinking. Every moment of Senior Week was planned by the university for the more obnoxious students, the ones with more class spirit than they knew what to do with, but I was never exactly one of those students. Caroline and I made our way through a couple of sponsored barbecues and the cocktail party with the President, but the majority of our Senior Week was spent together, in our apartment, out to lunch, getting manicures, or running through those legendary fountains in the middle of the night.

There were no papers to be written, no exams or presentations for which we had to prepare; nothing to do but pack up boxes of our belongings and reminisce about the past four years. It was sweet and sometimes boring, and we'd laugh about having nothing to do. I would wake up without an alarm clock and wander into Caroline's room, get in her bed, and we'd watch a movie, first thing in the morning. And then it was 11:30 AM, so we'd go out to lunch, the only ones under 60 in the whole restaurant.

I look back on that week as bizarre and a little scary, but so fun. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, about to jump off and fly away as soon as I boxed up the last of my books.

My brother is graduating on Saturday. This is his Senior Week. And as I looked back to remember what it felt like then, I could feel it, not from reminiscing, but because even three years later it's still there. That feeling of potential, and blindness, and a little bit of fear, and a lot of excitement, all wrapped into one.

There is a distinct feeling of weekend mornings, especially those in spring.

They are cool and wet, sometimes rainy, mostly smelling of sunscreen, and if you've ever spent a year or two living with a man who is now halfway across the country from you, then they can be lonely.

Spring comes back to me every year, carrying memories tied to scents and songs that remind me of some life I used to have. The most recent life that has been visiting me lately is the one last year where I hardly made enough money to pay my rent each month and daydreamed about a job with a desk and no beverage cooler to organize; one that wouldn't chip my nail polish every time I reached into the sink to get an espresso cup.

Two years ago (which is amazing to say, because that Christmas does not feel two years ago yet), I got a beautiful watch for Christmas, and I put it in its little box on my dresser and waited for the day that I could wear it to a job where I was neither a barista nor a graduate student, and could wear a watch that was not waterproof or a pretty shirt without fear of spilling something onto myself.

It's almost been a year since I moved back home, I thought yesterday as I drove away from the office that allows me to dress up and wear my watch without fear, the one that challenges me in a new way every day. A year ago, Rob and I were packing up the apartment we shared together in Charlottesville. We were going out for brunch and taking walks around our neighborhood together.

When I think about the distance to Minnesota, or even just to DC, I am amazed and sometimes appalled that at one time, I had Rob in the same city, living at the same address, eating dinner at the same table, falling asleep and waking up in the same bed as me, every day. I don't know if we realized, at the time, just how good it was. We definitely didn't realize, at the time, just how far away from each other we'd end up a year later.

Things then might have been simple and easy and full of love, but they weren't nearly as promising as the things we have now because of our sacrifices. Now things are complicated and hard, but still full of love, which is the thing that I am quickly realizing matters the most.

There is always something about this specific place in time, now, that is so difficult to grab onto with anything but impatience.

Here's to patience.

When it rains and is warm and stays light out until well after 6:00 PM, I feel hopeful. I always say that I feel like myself at the beginning of autumn, but I guess that's not entirely true. It's the combination of the two. Fall promises that brighter times are coming, and then spring delivers.

It's the beginning of both of these seasons--fall and spring--where I truly feel like the person that I want to be. The productive person who reads and goes running every day, who doesn't feel anxiety, who laughs constantly and spends time with friends and tries to love everyone and eats brunch and drinks Bloody Marys outside on patios on a regular basis.

So when it rains and is warm and stays light out until well after 6:00 PM, I start to think about last year in Charlottesville, with walks around UVA and pistachio milk lattes on the patio of my favorite coffee shop and Sunday mornings at home with Rob.

I think about Farmville, and our undergrad adventures with roommates and friends who made everything fun. I think about Clarissa and Dirty Shirleys with Caroline at one of two of the only bars in town, and the 45-minute drive that Raquel and I used to make just to get dinner from Chipotle.

And next spring, I'll look back at this spring and think about taking my dog downtown for the St. Patrick's Day parade and stopping to let every kid we passed pet him, walking around until he was so tired and happy he could barely keep his eyes open on the drive home. I'll look back at the spring on the lake where so much of my life felt like it was in transition, and I'll feel the same way I do each year, but different.

I drove from Charlotte, North Carolina to Roanoke, Virginia on Wednesday night, and as the winter rain came down onto the road and onto my windshield, fogging up the glass and making me shiver in my coat and turn up the heat, I thought about the summer of 2012.

--

Rob had just finished his coursework at UVA and I was almost done with my master's thesis from Hollins, and we packed up our apartment in Charlottesville and went to the lake for the weekend. Then, with nothing really to do, we went down to Charlotte for a few days to visit his parents before making the trek back up, past Roanoke, this time to DC. It was the end of May and it was hot and muggy and the summer rain came down onto the road and onto my windshield, fogging up the glass.

Rob went to China that summer and I moved back into my parents' house, hell-bent on finishing my thesis. I remember that airport goodbye so well--Rob's bags, the skirt I was wearing, the flip flops on my feet and the feeling of uncertainty that crept through me as we kissed goodbye. This is it, I thought, the end of our planning so far. I didn't have a job yet and I wasn't even done with my graduate program, but when he came back from China, he'd be done and he'd be with me at the lake until he left and after that point, we'd be apart.

I can't remember the moment I first really knew that Rob and I were always going to be together--it's just something that sort of settled in naturally, creating a pocket of belonging and joy in my life that I never questioned.

So he went to China and I got a job in Roanoke and he came back and then he left for Northern Virginia, and it wasn't ever an issue. After years of being near and living together, being apart and living away was just the new thing that we did so that we didn't have to say goodbye.

--

As I drove north from Charlotte this week and the rain came down, the Cloudy Day Nostalgia that hit me felt different than I had expected it to. It was new. As though that road ahead of me was winding with possibility after possibility and one good thing after another.

People will be going back to school soon.

On Monday, one of my college roommates posted a couple of things to my Facebook wall, and they made me laugh until tears ran down my face. It reminded me that my old friends are only one of those far away things in my life that makes me miss undergrad so dearly.

Autumn is my favorite time of year, and I think a lot of it has to do with college. The packing and moving and starting over as the leaves begin to change--it does something to me. There's magic in the new notebooks and the old books on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, with treasures of underlining and notes just waiting to be discovered. When Rob and I first started dating, I was taking a Victorian class and we used to sit down together with my used copy of an extraordinarily large Norton Anthology of English Literature and read what the people who owned it before me had written in the margins.

I try every time, but I can never quite put my finger on it.

And so, for the third time on this blog, I quote:

"If only one could come back to this quiet place, where only intellectual achievement counted; if one could work here steadily and obscurely at some close-knit piece of reasoning, undistracted and uncorrupted...then, one might be able to forget the wreck and chaos of the past, or see it, at any rate, in a truer proportion. Because, in a sense, it was not important. The fact that one had loved and sinned and suffered and escaped death was of far less ultimate moment than a single footnote in a dim academic journal establishing the priority of a manuscript or restoring a lost iota subscript. It was the hand-to-hand struggle with the insistent personalities of other people, all pushing for a place in the limelight, that made the accidents of one's own personal adventure bulk so large in the scheme of things." --Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night

On Saturday morning I woke up in Charlottesville with a headache, squinting as I almost fell out of bed in search of my cell phone. The bed-side tables in our room had already been moved, so everything was sprawled across the floor along the edge of the bed. 8:03 AM. It's only been a week, but I'm used to being at the office with caffeine already freely flowing through my system by 8:00. I slipped into some yoga pants and threw on a tank top, now searching for an umbrella as I made my way to the door. Rain fell down in a gentle mist, and I could feel it before I even saw it. The morning was chilly and wet, a combination that never fails to awaken something inside of me that I love.

It wasn't until several hours later that I realized how much I smelled like summer.

Sure, different smells can arouse all sorts of memories. And sure, sunscreen smells like summer. But I was startled by how very specific my thoughts and memories were.

I thought of grad school--those six weeks starting in July, and Men, Women, and Dragons: Gender and Identity in Fantasy for Children, which was from 9AM-12PM every Monday and Wednesday in that freezing room in the art building. I thought about quick Starbucks runs for dirty iced chais by myself on those same days before my History & Criticism class. I thought of that apartment with the brick walls and the cold shiny floors. I thought about Roanoke, last summer. All this, because of some sunscreen.

It's the way that filling my car with gasoline doesn't do anything to me, but the way the smell of gasoline from someone else's car when I'm sitting in traffic on a hot day reminds me of summer afternoons spent in the sun, in a boat, on the lake.

It makes me wonder what smells will hit me in the years to come, reminding me of this current season of life.

I know that it's a little early to be fantasizing about summer. But spring has definitely sprung, and that's something.

Any time there's a shift in the weather, I find myself longing for my undergraduate life. The way that an afternoon spent in warm sunlight makes my skin smell is enough to send me into a daydreaming spiral of nostalgia. I just want it to be socially acceptable for me to be reading books on a deadline and talking about them in a classroom all the time. And live in a library.

When I was living in Roanoke last year, these days would make me feel so blue. But this past week of warm days has made me really grateful to live so close to the University of Virginia. I just walk around and get some coffee, and when I get home I'm inspired to sit down and work on my thesis. It's been a sunny, happy past few days, and really, my only concern is that I'm going to have to reside in college towns for the rest of my life. We'll see.

My friend Patrick and I spent the afternoon walking from our neighborhood over to The Corner, stopping by The Lawn to let his little dog explore. We ended our walk at Para for iced chai lattes and I learned that they have homemade almond milk! We sat outside and talked for a while.

Yesterday I sat at my computer and Gmail-chatted with one of my very best friends for a nice long talk. Caroline and I lived together for three of our four years at Longwood University. If you haven't read about me and Caroline and the legend that is 849, you can catch up here and then come back.

Ready?

I tried to remember the last time I had sat down to catch up with her for more than two minutes and honestly couldn't even remember it. I found myself pleasantly surprised every time we changed the subject. Neither of us had anywhere to go and we had time to actually catch each other up and make plans to see each other soon.

There was a time in our lives when we didn't even go three hours without speaking--most of the time when we did speak, it was face to face in our apartment. Text messages were exchanged constantly. Lunch together every day, dinner together every night, walking around campus together every afternoon. I had a friend with whom I was so inseparable, we'd go home and share half of an apartment together.

Where did that world go?


There are times when I feel very adult. And then there are times when I am flooded with absolute panic at the thought of what "real life" must be like. It's exhausting sometimes, living life in this liminal space between undergrad years and a master's degree and, somewhere off in the distance, a career.

I have to say that while I miss the life of academia--of actually living in your studies, reading for countless hours, where your work was constantly guided and improved--I miss the life of 849 even more. I miss things like celebrating everything for any reason at all and nicknaming people we would never actually talk to.

Last month on New Year's Eve, Caroline texted me and said "I had a dream last night that we lived together with our boyfriends. It was weird but also kind of nice," to which I responded, only half-kidding, "That sounds like the dream."

Peter Pan bothers me as a character. Sometimes when I start thinking like this I'm reminded of him. He needs to grow up, you know? I'm not Peter Pan. I know I have to grow up. I think that's where the nostalgia comes from.

They have always meant something. Years ago, Sundays were for family--for 11:30 mass and breakfast right after. They were for Catholic friends and parents and nice talks over hot mugs and scrambled eggs. Sundays were for an afternoon walk through Barnes & Noble and for you to peek your head into Ann Taylor LOFT, "just in case."

In college, Sunday was for being homesick. It was for disliking the church in your new town and slowly ceasing to show up there, and for calling your parents to catch up. There were still eggs and coffee, though, as you sat in the dining hall with your friends and ate and laughed. After your first year at school, your new Sunday became normal and you looked forward to that omelet and those potatoes and the never ending coffee with your beautiful roommates and some other people who would become your family away from home.

Then you graduated. Maybe you went back home for some time. You could have your original Sundays back--just reach out and take them--but you've changed. You might still go to church sometimes. You might still spend the day with your parents sometimes. You might go back to college to spend the weekend with your boyfriend sometimes, letting Sundays continue with friends and a dining hall. The Sundays have evolved, and life and your very self feel different.

Another year later, Sunday was for working. It was for serving coffee, but no eggs, to people from 10:30 AM to 5:00 PM and wishing you had time to write. It was for thinking about your thesis and dreaming of a job you would love. It was for being a little bit sad, and wishing to be spending the day with a book and your parents or roommates from college or your brother or boyfriend--anyone you love.

And now, just a few months later, that coffee shop has hired a new person and you have Sundays off again, and this time they are so that you can write. So you can tip-toe into the living room for an old Moleskine and actually put a pen to paper because people are asleep in the guest room where you keep your computer. Sundays are for reading and working on your dreams and deciding where to go later for eggs and coffee.