I Don't Have Anything To Complain About

I just danced around my bedroom with my little sister, her hair flying around her face and her tiny hand in mine. She knows all the words to "I See the Light," that song I shared earlier. She came into my room dressed in a pink party dress and her tiny wrists drooping with my bracelets.

I pulled through third term with my grades, my friends, and most of my dignity. APUSH is finished, good riddance. I get to look forward to another term with Ms. Cardona, third block. Tomorrow I'll jet off to Fort Lauderdale to catch a ship that will cruise me around the caribbean for an entire week. I know the people I love.

I'm a nostalgic person; I don't usually like endings and I need mementos to hold in my hand and rub my fingers across. But there's very little I want to take from this term. I'm packing it all in a box, all the pressure and expectation and guilt and fear and anger and regret and hatred, packing it into a box that I'll leave here while I vacation. I'll probably end up unpacking it sometime next term. It seems sort of inevitable, you know, for me.

But I feel so much lighter now. The idea that I could feel like this all the time makes me want to drop out of school, make a beeline for the woods, and channel my inner Thoreau, fill journal after journal, canvas after canvas, take photographs, explore, experience fully a small piece of the world. I'm in love, and I'm accomplished, and I'm going to travel, and I'm happy.

Today, life is good. I'm so happy that I want to cry. Maybe that's not how you think emotions are supposed to work, but I don't particularly care what Mr. So-and-so-Ph.D has to say. Seeing my sister's face light about like the sun, all because she's spinning in circles in my arms, makes me want to cry with happiness.