Designated Doodler

I should be freaking out, but am I? Nope. I don’t know what it is about this year but my attitude in general has gone from wound ten notches too tight to not really being bothered about the things that most people would have a coronary over. But instead of looking at the various things I have to be freaked out about…I decided to go get frozen yogurt. I think spring break messed me up even more. I have no fire left really. My thoughts are drunk off the notion of summer and in the distance I can catch a glimpse of graduation. “Just one more year,” is the only phrase that keeps scrolling across my mind like a broken stock ticker. So instead of freaking out about what I have to do, or what’s going on I’m chilling here at my laptop, listening to some old school rap and writing this. I’m not much of one to procrastinate, so I would say that this is very out of character for me. But if you saw my options you’d understand. My options are these…finish my rather large paper that’s due to

Four and a half hours is a long time. That’s how long it takes me to drive home. I’m not the kind of person who likes being alone in just everyday life, so not seeing or talking to anyone for nearly five hours…is not my idea of fun. The familiar roads rise and fall, twist and lean in the same way that they did one and two and nearly three years ago. Me and my ridiculous memory know where every billboard stands. I told Claudia once to wait until we reached the top of a hill because I knew precisely what billboard lived there. I study ever stretch of road, every car’s driver’s whim, and every twisted tree that stretches to the clean blue sky, every patch of flowers that bravely grow uninhibited. Every hour or so I will see a sight that awakens in me this yearning to paint what I am seeing, but I know I cannot, and the beauty quickly becomes a blur that I leave behind. Sometimes in that drive I find beauty, and sometimes in that drive I find fear. That familiar sensation that I am