When Reality is Titled Sideways

It's part of life, so I thought I would've gotten used to it by now. And I thought I was okay with the monstrous changes in my life until I found myself mourning what was lost.

Sooo...here's the scoop: I'm not a fan of change.

It's crazy how life seems stagnant for so long: my life as a dried-up patch of desert. Snow from mountains slowly melted, yet I didn't see change coming, trickling down in cold droplets and forming a stream over dusty rocks where, it seemed, no life had ever been. And now that water rushes down from above, there's suddenly a river where I thought there could never be one, and from that river comes life and feeling and so much more.

Amidst this change: the desert flooded by water that does not dry up underneath a blazing sun: I find myself, undeniably longing, for the cracked and weathered surface of the sandy, dry wilds. Mourning for the desert that I feel I have deserted. Somehow I miss what is lost, what had gone to the altercation of memory and history, forever. 

I found myself mopping the walls of a house where someone else had lived. I moved slowly from room to room and watched the water from someone else's life turn from sediment pearl to murky brown, slowly to nicotine yellow, and finally to a ghoulish grey. And I wondered whether the river flooding my life would do the same: remove layers I never discovered of myself. 

The verb "moving" meant so little to me before I was covered in dust and cobwebs from head to toe: before my shoulders and back and legs ached. Before I was patching gouges in the wall of a house that had somehow come to know me. And as it knew me better than I did, through the gouges in the walls and the chipped paint held together with tape, it knew well that I wouldn't miss it until it was close to going. And maybe "moving" didn't mean living in another house, but moving on. 

While I'm submerged, I guess, in this current, I want to take a moment of gratitude for this unexpected, winding river, for the water that is ever-flowing. 

When reality is tilted sideways and I'm mopping walls instead of floors, I feel like I'm trying to read literature outside of class. It's exciting to see new perspectives, experience something I may have never considered, and ask critical questions about texts. It's always been fascinating to me as to why authors' works are anthologized, studied, or even radical. I wonder if they felt like they were turning reality sideways, or if in some small way, they were experiencing something new, too. 

A quote from Virginia Woolf that I love is this: "Do not move, do not go. Sink within this moment. Hold it forever."