It's.

OVER.

We were two of the very last test-takers in the echoing empty lecture hall except one sweating struggling guy in a trenchcoat and Dan the guy we met through facebook and studied like mad with because as it turns out he was as terrified as we were and for good reason. Between the three of us we would ace that bitch. Between the one of us... well we would see.

So we are the last ones to leave and we talk to our TA for the last time and hold in our joy because we like him and don't want him to feel bad. Tiptoe tiptoe tiptoe out of the room so recently warm with sweaty nervous panicky gripping or cool calm collected cocky faces and fingers and hands and our arms are around each other and it's like the end of a movie.

We're not even all the way through the middle-place between the hall and the bright crisp outside when the shout flies up into the rafters. We shove through the doors and sing out to the heavens with whoops and hollers that come only from lips raw from biting and rewetting over and over again in nervous bursts of energy for the weeks and weeks and weeks that make up the first semester of college.

Now we're shouting and running and twirling the bright winter sun and squinting at each other's wide wide grins and skipping up the hill because we feel so light it's like the weight was lifted from our heads and now we are free once more. We come upon the mall and there are people milling and Testudo is covered with offerings and an index card that says I <3 Testudo! and I rub his nose for good luck or obsessive compulsive tendencies whichever comes first and suddenly I want to cartwheel down the mall and we do and I do five or six in a row and when I stop it's only because I'm so dizzy I'm cartwheeling in circles and I suddenly want Newton's perpetual motion theory to take hold of me and send me whizzing into space where I can cartwheel forever into eternity.

So we pick up and yell some more and we're almost home and there is a low-hanging branch a huge one we never noticed before right next to our building and we want to climb it so I try and jump and I go flying it's like the tree clotheslined me and my oof! and skid down the embankment makes another complete stranger fall over laughing in passing and it feels too good to be embarrassed and we laugh together and Jess gives me a boost and I climb up and up and up and shutterbug shutterbug she takes pictures with my ever-present camera until I can't climb anymore thought I could if I was as old as I felt and that age is ten.

After Jess's turn too we head back to the dorm where Jaime and Zoe have wandered off and without Jaime's phone but they find their way back and tell us about the sheep. It's perfect that I feel ten again because I always go back to then whenever we see each other that's what always happens I just want to curl up with a book and confine ourselves to bed and speak backwards and draw pictures of Jupitans and reminisce of the playground and the game that grips our lives still even eight or so years later and still know that it's not just our pasts that hold us together.

I'll tell you about the metro adventure tomorrow maybe.

Today's theme is FREEDOM.

ink :: graphite