A Quick Note from the Library

I know it’s March already, but my mind is still reeling over the summer and settling back into semester, but it feels good, and my mind feels focused, mostly.

Summer break was spent home in South Africa, the Atlantic wind wrapping around me like something I had almost forgotten but immediately remembered how to love. Bloubergstrand, salt in the air, the cold shock of the ocean, the mountains standing like sentinels in the distance. It felt like a reset. A real break. The familiar tongue, the neighbourhood roads, my childhood revisited.

New Year’s Eve on home soil, welcoming 2015 with the people most familiar, felt necessary. It was the entry to my final year of university, but the whole time I was there, I hardly thought about it. It was like stepping outside of time, into a dream.

Now, I’m back. Sitting in the library, an essay for my World of Cinema class freshly submitted, a draft for my Investigative Journalism final still waiting to be wrestled into shape. I’m writing about Sea World, it’s all injustices and legal jargon and awful mistreatment of animals — and let me just say, Fuck Sea World.

The summer has been unrelenting, the kind of heat that clings to your skin, that makes the city shimmer at midday.

The internship is finished, too. That chapter closed. It was good, it was fun, I went to the team dinner and they gave me some physical copies of the magazine with my published writing in there. Oooo my ego had swirled about in my mind, my inner monologue having a moment, but now, I’m moving steady forward.

Afternoons have been for comforting pho on George Street with classmates, for movies in air-conditioned cinemas, for stealing weekends where we can. It’s for not rushing, taking time. To reflect, appreciate. Because I know—I know—this year is going to fly.

I am reminded of when John O’Donohue wrote about how somewhere in us a dignity presides that is more gracious than the smallness that fuels us with fear and force. A dignity that trusts the form a day takes. So at the end of this day, we give thanks for being betrothed to the unknown, and for the secret work through which the mind of the day and wisdom of the soul become one.