Meant To Be

Don't Stop

Oh, my, you and I

Let's leave it all behind and

Oh, I, know those eyes

You and I've got the same mind

- Runaway, from FOUR's second album, Falling Asleep Without You

The next few weeks pass in a blur. Holland and the boys are almost done their tour, and I'm busy with schoolwork and my screenplay, which technically is schoolwork as well but which is such a massive project that it constantly inhabits its own place in my brain, a box just labeled 'panic'.

Actually, it's going well. I think.

I like it, anyway. It feels real, to me. It feels good. It's based a lot on my own life experiences, and while it doesn't really have a title yet, at least not one I'd actually be confident enough in to share with other people, in my own head I've been calling it "Girl at Sea".

It's sort of about growing up on an island, and the dichotomy of the cities and the woods and the need to adapt to this culture of the rest of the society when that's not really how you grew up, and also just growing up in general and climate change and forests and learning how to lose things, but also learning to fight for the things you can't lose.

And the pain of realizing that there are some things you've lost, or are in the process of losing, that you can't do anything about.

I just hope that it's not garbage.

I really need it to not be garbage. I haven't shown it to anyone yet. I don't know what I'll do if they just tell me that it's awful, because at this stage, it wouldn't be about the writing it would be about the whole concept. And I don't think I'm ready to let this concept go.

I've practically set up shop in the library. It's not that the house isn't a good place to work, but something about the atmosphere of the library just does things for my writing. That and Starbucks, of course. I think all of the baristas there know me by name at this point.

Fall officially sets in, turning the campus to a palette of oranges and reds and crisp winter air. And rain - can't forget about the rain. I love the rain, but just occasionally, it would be nice to step on a fallen leaf and have it crunch, instead of just being a soggy, slippery health hazard.

(especially when you've been writing for three hours straight and your lugging around a bag of textbooks - and a full water bottle, which is somehow heaver - and you're wearing your oldest and rattiest pair of sneakers. Not that I would know from experience or anything.)

It's quieter, what with midterms really setting in. For me, there's less studying, as about half of my classes have projects instead of proper exams, but I'm still reciting poetry in my sleep and getting very tired of learning what horrible tragedy made some old guy into the best poet ever, or memorizing the day that they died. And why is it always their wife or daughter who dies some tragic death? (Victor Hugo, I'm looking at you.) Not to mention learning all of shakespeare's plays inside and out, because apparently we didn't do that enough in high school.

I'm kidding. I love shakespeare. And I actually don't hate exams that much - it's just that, for me, arts exams can be more overwhelming than say, a subject where there actually is a right answer and everything isn't just left up to interpretation.

Though I can do a mean essay question.

I'm talking to Holland about this - complaining, really, but what good is a boyfriend for if not complaining to? - one rainy day in late October, sitting in the living and staring out the window, the complete works of Emily Dickinson laid out in front of me. Now, she was a poet.