Micro Fiction Monday - Freedom (BEDS 404)

I keep my eye on the horizon. It stretches forever; I’m not used to it. I’m used to concrete towers, buildings stretching high into the sky, people visible from every corner and every coordinate. Business and busyness, cramped and crazy, where the closest thing to freedom is stepping on a balcony as high as you can get. Where you try to see everything, but can only ever get a fraction of all the uninterrupted movement. Flatness is foreign to me.

But here, flat is everywhere—where the tallest building is a storey and a half, and I can see the end of every street I turn onto. Where the greens outnumber the greys, and the sky is so blue that it seems more like a cartoon backdrop than reality. The air smells different, tastes different, feels different. Here, freedom is seeing the world open up around you, its limits beyond your line of sight, if there are even any limits at all. Freedom is reaching up towards the clouds, because they’re so close that touching them is somehow closer to a reality than a mere possibility. Freedom is reaching out on either side, and never touching another soul.

Freedom is feeling like, at any moment, you can jump and never come down.

Micro Fiction Monday: Summer Is

Summer is feet on the dashboard, plastic warmed by the shining sun. It’s the howling wind when you roll down the car window, the country station blasting through the speakers. Summer is an excuse to eat ice cream, licking the stray drips off your fingers. It’s running around barefoot, abandoning your sandals to feel the sand, the pavement, the grass beneath your toes.

Summer is possibility. It’s the feeling that longer days mean more time, that you can hop on the wind and ride it for miles. Summer is temporary freedom—from school, from work, from responsibility. It’s a day at the beach, or at the park, or just driving around doing nothing at all.

Summer is everything, and nothing. It’s a vacation, a road trip, cramming every second full with something new and exciting. It’s a day spent at home, in the comfort of air conditioning, licking a popsicle from the comfort of your own couch. Summer is both comfort and excitement, and everything in between.

Summer is the hope that, at the end of it all, you’ll have an amazing story to tell.

FREEDOM

Let me tell you, folks, I have taken summer for granted for FAR TOO LONG.

My blog posts have been, clearly, off track as of late. This happens a lot. I'm not proud. But every now and then, I have a valid excuse. Like four exams, one student film, two different website codes, one paper, and a weekend in which I proudly did nothing but scroll through Tumblr and play Wind Waker. (Followed by a couple weeks in which I didn't update because, really, what else is new?)

Now that exams have passed and the academic year has ended, I feel a foreign sense of freedom that I have not felt in years. It's strange, because I now find myself in the same life situation I held for two years--no classes, no homework, just a part time job and all my time to devote to writing. (Or playing Sims. Mostly playing Sims.) I have the exact same amount of freedom now as I had before I restarted my academic career back in September.

Now, though, it feels more...liberating. After months of cramming homework into every spare moment, of studying at work and writing notes on the bus, I now have NOTHING TO DO. I have all the time in the world to work on as many personal projects as I want--or to just sit on my butt and watch Netflix until my brains ooze out of my ears. (Which I've done. A lot.)

I find myself making plans, massive to-do litsts with more items than I probably have time for. And I did the same thing even before I went back to school--although my free time never actually increased, it still felt like it did during the summer. I don't think this feeling will go away after I graduate, either. This is something that has long been engraved into my brain, and will stick around for probably an enternity. There's just something about summer that has this almost magical feel to it.

I guess that's why it's my favourite season.

Until later,

- Justyne