Ash's Obsessions du Jour

Tagged by Pen - here we go.

1. Noticing. Everything. Contemplating the light through the windows in the apartment in the late afternoon. Considering Kudzu's regular patterns of movement from room to room and neat jumps onto the windowsills. Ways of getting from one place to the other in town, recognizing the acute knowledge of each curve and straight and landmark - I know this road. Wondering (but trying not to overly much) if this will be the last time I do this or that in Wilmywood before I move. Noticing. Everything.

2. Quiet solitude. Not that quiet is the way anyone would describe me - prone to nervous chatter as I am and filling silences with it. And generally talking too much and too loudly. But today is quiet, and I relish the quiet and hold the quiet.

3. Oakdale Cemetery. Having never been there until yesterday, I was unaware that it holds the esteem of being quite possibly the only place in Wilmywood that I might describe as "hilly." Any other season, it might be drab - naked wintry branches or fully-leaved summer trees. But in spring, it is blossoming and fragrant and serene.

4. Songs that I hear that have a confusing context. How sometimes The Killers' "Smile Like You Mean It" sounds like a song Kim and I would've listened to in the car on the way to the beach, even though it came out after we graduated. Or how The Fray's "How to Save a Life" feels impossibly like a song from college that I would've listened to on repeat going up Stretch Road and hummed to myself as I rattled around Frost Chapel.

5. Kudzu's relentlessness in waking me these days when he wants to be fed. His pawing the covers off me and wet nose on the eyelids. He drives me mad until I stumble into the kitchen and crack open a can. But then, after he's eaten and I've gone back to bed, he'll curl up against my spine in a tight circle and I feel loved.

6. My secret day off. I hedged about going home for Easter because I selfishly wanted a three-day weekend to myself. Other than my sister, sworn to secrecy, my family thinks today was just another day at the office.