During the winter the ground turns into the sun. The light bounces off of the snow burning your eyes and you’re forced to squint at the entire landscape. At times, you feel like your walking directly on the sun, an alien on a foreign planet. Each step crunches and glimmers, your snow boots turning into space boots and your winter coat becoming white. What would usually be a calming breeze slaps your face and you tuck your body close to yourself, finding warmth in foreign territory. Still, you can’t help but find beauty in this new terrain. How can something be so dry and harsh, yet still covered in water?

I almost never dream- or at least I don’t remember them, so when I hear people speak about their own, I get unreasonably jealous. I too wish I could go on crazy adventures or even scary thrillers. I wish I could turn into someone else in the night when nobody's looking. I wish I could make the whole world do what I wish or figure out what it feels like to fly. But mostly, I wish that I could use sleep as a chance to have a second life without changing the one I currently have.

I am not sure if I ever really lose things. To me, lost seems absolute. The idea of lost and found always annoyed me because thing that are truly lost never come back to you. Whenever I lose my keys or an earring, I always find them in the most unusual places. But when you really lose something, it never returns and all you have is the memory of where you think you put it, or when you last enjoyed it.

Outside my bedroom window on main street here in Ann Arbor, fire trucks always race past my house. At this point I shouldn’t be surprised by them but my body has a mind of its own. Every time the sirens scream, my pulse increases and I feel the uncontrollable urge to look out the window. I even wake up as they wail in the middle of the night. Along with the noise, there is the light. My whole room becomes a pulsing red, as if the trucks brought the fire to me and not the other way around. Red screams have found a home in my room, even with the blinds closed. Now, even when the fire isn’t mine, I’m forced to feel anxious about it anyway.

Yesterday I was practicing block starts and my coach described them as the art of falling. He said, "it should feel like the moment you get tripped and your legs scramble quickly to catch you." It’s feeling like you’re going to fall flat on your face unless you push and sprint away as fast as you can. Sometimes you feel like you’re going to fall and you actually do- or at least you trip or stumble. But the art of falling requires practice, until it is so natural that you become a cat with nine lives, always landing on your feel. Track is like physics and block starts is the study of gravity.

‘Getting there’ is the kind of response you make when your mother asks if you finished your homework and you don’t want her to know that you haven’t even started so you say, “getting there.” Or sometimes you say ‘getting there’ when your trying to get over your frustration but in reality your still angry. The phrase is purposefully vague and a good way to pretend you know what your doing. To pretend you know where or what ‘there’ is and that you also know how to get ‘there.’ the last time I said 'getting there' was in class when my professor asked how close I was to finishing my paper when I hadn’t even started.

Wouldn’t it be cool if humans were born with striped or patterns on their skin? We would slide into the world with the stripes across the bridge of our noses and polka dots on the palms of our hands. Our patterns would be like full body fingerprints, unique only to ourselves, we would be like the fur of a tiger that we hang on our walls.

I’ve always wanted to live in the city. Not for the rest of my life, but for a few years in my 20s when I’m totally independent. I think it would be comforting to wake up to the sounds of traffic and conversations. I would be able to become alone in a crowded space, finding solace in having people around me all the time, but not having to talk to them. I also find cities to be beautiful and magical. How else would those buildings manage to float in the sky?

A few days ago I was on a blue bus with a group of little kids. It was at 9:40am and the kids probably weren’t a day past 5 years old. When I stepped on the bus, they were already seated in the back with a few adult supervisors, their high pitched chatter and giggles drifting towards the front. For a second I felt like I was back in elementary school or at summer camp. I had such strong nostalgia that I stood for a moment remembering the early mornings I took the bus, surrounded by silly little kids on my way to second grade.

Spring sounds like crying babies during a thunderstorm and impatient honking during rush hour as people race towards summer. Spring sound like sniffing noses and the chattering of birds as they tell each other how much they love the spring. Spring sounds like the splash of boots in puddles and the steady drip of snow melting. Spring sounds like mother nature’s loud yawn as she finally begins to stir

“I know someone who’s obsessed with whales and that’s one of the few things anyone knows about him.” I mean sure, we know that he gets up every morning and showers in the nights. And he has a class in mason hall- ut besides that, close to nothing. I found out that he like whales randomly too- by pure chance. We were walking past a bulletin board and a sign for climate change hung in the middle, clean and laminated. My friend even stopped in his tracks and stared for a few seconds

I have a passionate hatred for mechanical pencils. I realized that I’m probably in the minority, but I’ve felt this way for a long time. It started one day in middle school when one of my friends asked to borrow my ‘wooden pencil.’ I was outraged. I’ve never heard any one describe a standard, normal pencil as something so antique and foreign. This is the original- so it is just called a pencil. Even more, mechanical pencils have so many claws. For one, the break super easily and make a terrible squeaky noise, like nails on a chalkboard. Plus, you have to buy lead an replace, where as normal pencils don’t require the this unnecessary maintenance. Before I chose to use normal pencils, and now I refuse to use mechanical ones. I also don’t understand how people only write in pen, not able to erase, but that’s another story for another time.

I realized recently that I’ve forgotten how to ride a bicycle. I’ve always thought it was just one of those skills that you never forget but in the fall, when I was thinking about bringing my bike to campus, I hopped on to ride down the street and almost fell on my face. I hadn’t gotten on my bike since at least middle school, and now it’s just an artifact of my childhood. Don’t get me wrong, I know how to ride it, one foot pushes then the other, but I’ve lost my touch. I’ve lost whatever that special thing is that only children have, and I will likely have to work twice as hard to get it back. I haven’t ridden my bike since, and it sits still in my garage forty minutes away, wondering where I’ve been.

I’ve only been to Hawaii once, and apparently I cried the whole time. My mother likes to bring up the story when she is feeling particularly vengeful, “remember when you ruined our family cruise to Hawaii by throwing a tantrum 24/7? Well I do.” After placing blame on me for the millionth time, she begins to theorize why I couldn’t stop crying- “the time change? A new environment? A horrible personality?” Luckily, she doesn’t tell the story for long because talking about this ruined trip usually reminds her of when she and my dad were supposed to go to Paris together, but as they drove to the airport, my dad suddenly had heart pains and they took an immediate left to the hospital. They never got to Europe and the doctors found nothing wrong. “At least a bad trip is better than no trip at all,” she says.