Earlier tonight, I rolled down Foss Hill in my underwear. No provocation; no reason, really.
Jia and Claire and I were sitting on the hill, taking in the quick-moving clouds that bore an ominous red from the sodium vapor lights of Middletown. We picked out shapes in the clouds and listened to The Flaming Lips from a nearby set of speakers.
I took off my shoes and shorts and shirt and went to the top of the hill. I laid down and let myself loose.
The grass was wet and gave way easily as I tumbled down, coating me with its dewy freshness and erasing the friction with each dizzying spin. It was egging me on, calling me to the bottom, seizing me and hurrying me along as fast as it could.
I went with it. Ended up at the bottom, on all fours, trying to get up with the world spinning all around me. Some trees came into focus, but I was still stuck, waiting for my brain to fix itself and gain its bearings.
Looking back, my feeble attempts to gain a footing, to stand up, to steady my swirling head are all so similar to where I am right now: spinning down a hill, being tossed around, dizzy and churned up, trying to steady myself but knowing that it can’t happen until things work themselves out on their own.
For a while earlier, it was really pouring. The raindrops were coming in sheets, pelting the leaves and branches all around the yard and making a chorus of clicks, taps, and ticks that somehow captured my mood: dewy, thick, soaked and saturated with the weight of a thousand, a million possibilities and worries and hopes and ideas and dreams. Directed yet flowing, strong yet dispersed, enveloping and total yet impossible to focus clearly on any single piece of the whole.
Thunder is rumbling in the distance now. The raindrops are still falling, albeit more slowly now. I am 22—I am getting older so quickly. But I am still spinning, spinning, spinning.
