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An(n)a was born in the Caribbean and spent her childhood a 15-minute drive away from the beach where she never bothered to learn how to swim. She once won a year's supply of Chick-Fil-A sandwiches on a local game show. Much like a puppy around new friends, she doesn't know how to hide her enthusiasm. She lives in New York where she goes to school and moonlights as an astrologer (not really).

Lurk a little. Go on.

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January 26, 2012

I don’t know if we actually grow up. Even if I have, which I am reluctant to believe, I don’t know if I’ve grown up in more mature direction(s).

I always thought going to college would mean developing a mental six-pack of sorts. I thought I’d become a person who does stuff. I’m coming to realize that while I can choose to have more “grown-up” habits, slowly train myself out of certain pretenses and into framing my thoughts and words in clear, incisive judgements, inevitably certain parts of my brain will always be pleasantly flabby. Inevitably I enjoy indulging in my flaws. They’re like invisible scars. And everyone loves a good scar.

I day-dream and need ridiculous, borderline-irresponsible amounts of time to myself during which I do nothing. I mean, yes I enjoy reading and walking and music and writing and watching movies and appreciating art in all the passive ways it can be appreciated, but there’s a large amount of nothing involved in all of that.

Picture it: lying on your back, staring at your ceiling, listening to your favorite rock albums. Picture it: walking for an hour, maybe two, changing your pace and posture, watching the faces that go by, trying not to laugh aloud and alone at the things you hear or see. Picture it: sitting on a terrace, ledge, balcony, secluded corner of a college campus, feeling the wind frost the edges of your cheeks and concentrating on how your gum moves from between your left mollars to right.

Picture it: a 40-minute shower where you’re standing there for 20minutes recreating the smallest sensory details of your favorite memories, imagining the way the buttons on a gray cardigan just kind of dangled or the way the skin at the ends of all your fingers felt particularly receptive to other skin.

Picture it: taking an hour to go to sleep not because you can’t fall asleep but because you need to make sure you enter the realm of sleep after having woven a satisfying fantasy, a pre-dream where you call the shots in case you can’t in actual sleep.

Picture it: all the hours of every day I waste trying to just get a hold of what it feels like to feel.