The One Circled Thing

The instructor handed back the first assignment at the end of class today. No fanfare, just a stack of pages face-down on the edge of the desk and a wave toward it, help yourselves. I was the third person to grab mine, which felt like the right amount of eager without being embarrassing. I turned it over in the hallway.

One comment. One thing circled in red pen, not corrected, not crossed out. Circled. And next to it, three words in handwriting I'm still trying to decode. I've been at my desk for three hours trying to decide if those three words are a compliment or a diagnosis.

Here's the thing, the assignment was supposed to be personal. Something observed, something lived. The prompt was almost offensively open-ended, and I spent forty minutes staring at a blank page before I just wrote what I actually remembered from a Tuesday morning last spring: the way the rec center parking lot smelled like wet pavement and somebody's dryer sheets, and how that particular combination makes me feel more awake than coffee does. It was small. It was almost embarrassingly small. And the instructor circled the dryer sheets line.

I thought about this blog the whole walk home. I've been writing things like that here for a year and a half, the small Tuesday-morning details, the things that don't add up to a point, and I always treated it like warm-up, like the real writing was something else I'd get to eventually. The circled line is making me wonder what exactly I've been warming up for. I don't have an answer yet. I just thought you should know the question finally showed up.

The hallway moment. Before I'd fully processed it.

Three hours later. Still at the desk. Still thinking about it.