He passed four months in resolving to lose no more time in idle resolves.*

I'm sitting on this awful, cheap couch

drinking the tea that I bought and forgot about until tonight.

I bought it for a change and to make myself feel better:

To feel wealthier,

like my bank account doesn't have a leak in it somewhere.

To feel prettier,

like I'm not wearing my old paint shirt again, or that my hair

hasn't been tied in a knot for the past week.

To feel classier,

like I'm not drinking it from a two dollar mug in a messy

apartment with dim lighting that makes me squint.

To feel healthier,

like I don't live on all the cliché college foods.

To feel smarter,

like I haven't seen any of my midterm grades yet.

I bought it to feel peace, because Indian tea could do that.

I'll try anything to get the line on my forehead to diminish so my friends will stop asking me what's wrong--to want to be with my friends in the first place instead of staying in to clean the kitchen on Friday night.

I shouldn't feel so indifferent about secluding myself, and maybe it won't happen tonight--maybe not even for a week or a month--but I will get better. Eventually.

Tea can't do more harm than good, can it?

-rae

*Samuel Johnson's Rasselas

waity

i missed my turn on the way home

and i kept driving

until i knew that i was getting too lost

i want to be deep and think of a

pretty way to say thats symbolic

of

exactly where my life is

heading now

but i cant

just like

i

can't

say

any thing

else.

-rae

It swallows me whole

I think that there's a certain beauty in handwriting--the way that everyone dots their i's and j's in their own order or has a unique way of constructing a k (by far the hardest one for me...) It's a most subtle movement that differentiates it into something that will always be your own creation, whether or not what's actually being written is original.

My handwriting looked like chicken scratch. Only a few months ago did I resolve to practice my penmanship whenever I had free time, mostly because I was determined to make it distinctly mine. Identifiable like my dad's all caps or enviable like my mom's elegant script. I ended up resurrecting cursive back from the third grade where the rest of the world left it. Who did I know that used it let alone could write a z with it?

So I took cursive and I wrote the living wits out of it. But I've realized that being able to look back on my notes in school was something of a necessity so, in no time at all, I've changed it again with a disturbingly low amount of difficulty.

It's unsettling because, among the many things you can learn about a person, I think there are three that say absolutely nothing and a whole lot of everything at the same time:

3. the shoes they are wearing

2. their favorite pizza toppings

and 1. their handwriting

I'm pretty confident about my boot collection, and I'm convinced that pepperoni, green peppers, and onions are the best pizza toppings in the known universe...but shoes and pizza have nothing on handwriting. I liken it unto a person's fingerprint; it is that telling and personal.

Because my handwriting is constantly changing, who's to say that I won't randomly develop a liking for Tom's or that I will no longer find pineapple and olives on pizza to be completely abhorrent?

Weeks ago, I loved the dark loops and density of my cursive, so why do I now prefer this wide and faint writing instead? From where have I pulled the patience that allows me to give each letter deliberate consideration?

I could be fooling myself because I'll always be cursive at heart... or maybe, even further back, I'm truly chicken scratch.

This handwriting might not even be me.

Maybe I don't have one particular style.

Maybe it's the change itself that says it all.

-rae

P.S.--Happy Valentine's Day! How lovely it'd be to see your handwriting on a love note.